It’s a rare thing in football for a match to end in a perfect outcome for absolutely everyone apart from the two teams actually involved.
There’s something absolutely exquisite about a result that leaves nobody directly involved particularly happy or sated.
After the initial thrill of their absurdly undeserved 96th-minute equaliser, you could tell United and their supporters didn’t really know what to make of it. It feels both obviously correct and entirely facetious to talk about a point gained in a match where the opposition have had to do so very little work to create not one but two two-goal leads.
Viewed objectively, a point should not be enough. It extends Manchester United and Michael Carrick’s winless Premier League run to a record-breaking eight games. It leaves them spending at least the next fortnight inside the bottom three, and at the end of that fortnight they have to travel to Anfield.
They are the one and only Premier League team not to have won at least two matches this season. Only bottom-of-the-table Crystal Palace and newly-promoted Ipswich have conceded more Premier League goals this season.
This one’s slightly unfair because obviously teams in Europe do play more games than everyone else, but the fact that across all competitions no team in Europe’s top five leagues has conceded more than United’s 30 goals is entirely absurd.
The idea that a manager of This Is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About could have any chance of surviving all that is just patently ridiculous. But also, how can they sack him now having failed to do so before a week in which his team have hit back from not one, not two, but three two-goal deficits?
Say what you like about United – and we will, at length – you can’t accuse them of downing tools. Except in the first five minutes of the first half here. Or the first eight minutes of the second. Or the first 15 minutes against Roma. Or… well, you get the idea.
Only starting to play when two goals down is surely unsustainable and just profoundly unserious. But there’s no denying that United have done precisely that in thrilling style on three occasions in their last two games now.
The Roma game already felt like an unrepeatable peak of unseriousness, a bunch of stuff that happened that shouldn’t be used by any sensible, self-respecting elite football club as evidence of anything. But if it keeps happening, does it in fact start to mean something?
The answer remains no. It is still, on balance, great news for everyone else if Manchester United look at the good bits of these last two games as reason enough to stick with Carrick and ignore the miserable starts they have made to three of their last four halves of football when already on an historically dreadful run.
All four goals they conceded here were just utterly calamitous and entirely avoidable. Perhaps the most striking thing about this whole absurd match is that for a side that scored four goals, Villa didn’t really play at all well.
Their first goal came in the first minute when Alysson was left entirely unmarked at the back post to shoot through Senne Lammens as if he were a hologram. SPOILER ALERT: this would not be the last awkward moment for a goalkeeper in this game.
A few minutes later, Lammens saved weakly from Alysson, diverting the ball straight back into the danger area for Nicolas Jackson to sweep home. It’s hard to think of a team having to do less to take a 2-0 lead in a game of football ever.
But then they did something odd. They sat back. They offered United hope and encouragement. By half-time, it was 2-2 with United having 40 minutes of something approaching total domination yet still looking alarmingly open on the few occasions Villa mustered anything in response, which only made Villa’s apparent reluctance to continue stomping upon such a visibly wounded creature more baffling still.
And yet, come the start of the second half, United were back doing what they do worst. An inexplicably stupid foul from Diogo Dalot to give John McGinn the chance from the penalty spot. Leny Yoro apparently forgetting that the teams had changed ends at half-time, forcing Lammens into a fine save with a bullet header from which Leon Goretzka eventually bundled home Villa’s fourth.
But just as United had failed to learn the lessons from the first half, so too did Villa. This was not your classic game of two halves. It was a game of one half played twice. Which, again, is much rarer.
Villa once again decided to stick with what they had (or, more accurately, had been inexplicably generously given) when they had already been shown the folly of that approach once already.
It took longer to backfire this time, which only made it more agonising. Hard to think of a more feels-like-a-defeat outcome than giving up a pair of two-goal leads, and doing so the second time via goals in the second and sixth of six added minutes.
If you did want to make it more galling, you’d probably have the final sickener of a goal come from a weak and unnecessary goalkeeping error, which Zion Suzuki delivered when flapping pitifully at Bruno Fernandes’ corner to allow Patrick Dorgu to head home.
Unai Emery stomped down the touchline in disgust after United’s second equaliser, meaning he missed watching a chance for Dalot to make it even worse in added time to added time. Dalot has only very occasionally been compared to peak Gareth Bale, but had he just had even a tiny bit of that magic he could have made it even more astonishing a finish here.
That wasn’t to be but it was still all too familiar a sight for Emery. This was his eighth game at Old Trafford as the visiting manager. His sides have across those games led 0-1, 1-2, 0-1, 1-2, 0-2, 0-2, and 2-4. They have won none of those games. It’s a kick in the guts for a club that already feels the world is against them.
As for Dorgu, he’d already marked his return to the United side by setting up Joshua Zirkzee’s apparent consolation minutes earlier.
He’s an unlikely contender for a Man United saviour, but we’re through the looking glass here. This is not a normal Manchester United. Not even by the post-Fergie standards.
This is a Manchester United who have placed their faith in a Championship-level manager. This is a Manchester United who spent the second half of this game with a genuinely alarming centre-back combination of Yoro and Ayden Heaven. Again, it just smells uncomfortably Champo.
It still feels like this is a United team that has too many goals in it to properly end up in a real-life relegation battle, but you wouldn’t stake your house on it. Not with that defence committing atrocity upon atrocity, in front of a keeper who has regressed alarmingly if understandably as a young keeper at a huge club watching on in horror as nonsense unfolds ahead of him.
But really, strip away the fact that This Is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About, and thus that talk of them getting relegated feels impossible, and you do have to wonder just what there is about them that means they can’t get into even dodgier territory than they already occupy.
Two ludicrous possibilities remain true. That the Manchester derby could be a Championship fixture next season. Or that United are the lucky losers who get to stay in the Premier League on the back of City getting a relegation-ensuring points deduction.
And more ludicrous still, there is now a serious prospect that Carrick could survive this staggeringly poor start because fighting spirit.
Fighting spirit shouldn’t be enough, not here. A point shouldn’t be enough, not here. But this is now such a reduced Manchester United, such a small and afraid Manchester United, that it very much could be.
And if we’ve learned absolutely nothing else – and we haven’t – from decades of watching this daftest of sports we know this deep in our bones: Michael Carrick’s Manchester United are definitely going to win at Anfield a fortnight from now.
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