Mainoo showed he is United’s main man with glaring absence vs. Leeds
Mainoo showed he is United’s main man with glaring absence vs. Leeds It’s too early to say whether the wheels finally came off the Michael Carrick train in Manchester United’s 2-1 humbling at home to Leeds United, but the signs were there. Performances have been wavering for a while and last month’s defeat at Newcastle United was in many ways overdue, but the leaden nature of the Leeds debacle in front of a dismayed home crowd felt like a turning point of the worst kind.
Familiar problems The big disappointment was how the team slumped into old habits, both collectively and individually . Spirited last half-hour aside, United were outmuscled, outrun and outmanoeuvred. Nowhere was this regression clearer than in the soft underbelly of United’s midfield, Manuel Ugarte ’s presence in place of the injured Kobbie Mainoo a sharp reminder of the excruciating lack of squad depth in that position.
One knock to the young Englishman and Carrick ’s only option was to reach for the cheerless Casemiro /Ugarte pivot which has been comprehensively found not to work. The Uruguay international ran hard and tackled strongly but his failings on the ball were a big reason why he had so much defensive work to do in the first place. His was a crucial role on the pitch for keeping control of the ball but he instead embraced darkness itself, welcoming chaos with open arms and loose passing.
Mainoo missed Carrick’s United thrive in lawlessness, games stretched into extended counterattack vs counterattack contests. But constantly ceding the middle ground through listless, wasteful passing has no romanticism, it’s just bad football. The United way is not giving the ball away then chasing it back down only to give away again, rinsed and repeated for 90 minutes plus injury time.
The lack of calm, sustained and progressive possession wasn’t all Ugarte’s fault, but as the stand-in for the metronomic Mainoo in that key position he inevitably shoulders much of the blame. Comparing the two players is an exercise in apples and oranges; the point isn’t that Mainoo is better than Ugarte, given that they do fundamentally different things, simply that United looked substantially worse without the 20-year-old quietly at the heart of things. Misunderstood The Carrington graduate is no longer universally loved by United’s fickle fanbase, but to understand Mainoo at this stage of his career is to understand that football isn’t just stats and numbers.