Too early to pass verdict
A few weeks ago, I talked about Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho finding himself in very unfamiliar territory when his team went four matches without a win, but if there are people going through a very strange experience right now it must be Manchester United fans. They have had several slow starts to a season but nothing like what is happening now has occurred in the last two decades.
Again, these are still early days and United have already played three of the teams that would be considered challengers for top honours, which should give them hope of climbing up the table in the forthcoming fixtures with less fancied teams. They maybe on position 12 at the moment, but they are only eight points off the top of the league, hardly an insurmountable lead for a team that is used to upsetting the odds.
Yet worries still linger among the Red Devils because the fight at the top promises to be very tight with more teams than usual showing serious ambition to fight for the top positions and you need a drop in the form of almost all of them for that climb up to be easier. The problem is that such an eventuality is largely out of the team’s hands because they have already met some of them, at least for the first round.
What should worry United fans even more is the overall performance of the team in comparison to the other contenders. There have been some decent performances by individual players here and there, but overall, the team has been found wanting and anyone who watched their latest defeat against West Bromwich Albion last Saturday cannot say the visitors were not deserving of their victory.
There is an argument to be made in defence of the side that they have not always needed to play well to win. Sir Alex Ferguson’s teams just had a way of winning even when performance levels were less than desirable. Indeed, without him they won convincingly against Swansea City on the opening day of the season without necessarily being as rampant as the scoreline would suggest, so there must be some hope there.
What is not in dispute, however, is that they need to start winning games immediately because they cannot afford to fall further behind. Any more dropped points makes the defence of the league title ever harder. The desperate need for a quick positive result alone has made this evening’s trip to the Stadium of Light to meet bottom side Sunderland assume much more importance than would normally be the case.
Managerless Sunderland have serious problems of their own having chalked only a single point in the opening six matches, but the law of averages provides that they have to win a match at some point and United will be hoping that this is not the day the table anchors get their breakthrough. Being a late afternoon kick-off, the other hope should be that they are not much further behind by the time they kick off.
At the other end of the table, it is the Arsenal that are leading the way. Given the several false dawns of the previous seasons, one needs to be cautious when passing a verdict on their current performance but it must be said that the Gunners have shown great consistency over the calendar year to suggest that they could have come of age after all. Their real mettle will, nonetheless, be proven when they meet more of the other contenders.
