Not too many weeks ago, this fixture looked a tasty affair.
Manchester United were still breathing in the vivacious aroma of a freshly unwrapped Anthony Martial, and West Ham were beating title favourites, marching to the rhythm of a resplendent new front line. Between September 12 and October 17, Manchester United scored 12 goals in five games, winning four of them, and looking dangerously like their old selves. Between September 14 and October 17, West Ham scored 11 goals in their four games, and were unbeaten, defeating Manchester City along the way. There was a pleasant breeze rustling through Old Trafford and Upton Park, and life was, as a result, appropriately breezy.
Five games later, for both teams, and the breeze has gone, replaced by a stale smell that just won’t shift. A stagnation has occurred at both clubs, a congealment aided and abetted by various withering injuries to key attacking players. United have managed only five goals in their last five fixtures, a limping return, matched exactly by the Hammers. For Louis van Gaal, he has been stripped of Ander Herrera, a player considered by most with a watchful enough eye to be arguably United most important attacking cog. Slaven Bilic, even more distressingly, has lost Dimitri Payet, a player considered by even those with the visual acuity of Stevie Wonder to be undoubtedly West Ham most important attacker. Two players, both cut down, and their teams’ offensive fluency has vanished with them.
Other, less acutely vital but nonetheless significant, players have also been crocked, on both teams. West Ham’s Enner Valencia, and most recently, Diafra Sakho are both down and out and will remain so for a while. The bubbly Jesse Lingard has been struck down for United, as has Antonio Valencia, who was quietly excelling as a wing back under Van Gaal. These players would have helped ease the pain that the absences of their more critical colleagues afflicted, and now, without them, West Ham and United’s reliance upon their injured stars has been even more callously exposed.
So, with the above in mind, few are expecting a goal-fest this weekend, when the two clubs take to the pitch at Old Trafford. Van Gaal’s side have already endured criticism this season for their retrogressive style, and the stats, although selective, are damning: in September, when they were leading the league in average possession, they made more backwards passes than any other team, and they were 18th in terms of shots on target. Yawn, indeed. It hasn’t really improved since then; late last month Sky tabulated which European teams had had the most shots on target so far this season, and Manchester United came in at 50th. It doesn’t help – in fact in actively hinders things – that Wayne Rooney is in deadly career-worst form. In his last 30 Premier League games, Rooney has scored six goals and provided one assist, that’s in over 2500 minutes of football. Now that Martial has perhaps receded toward the mean, Rooney’s contributions appear even more horrendously meagre.
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As for West Ham, well, the injury to Sakho is a truly gut-churning wound. The Senegalese will have his thigh scanned in the next 24 hours, and only then will we know the exact extent of the damage done, but it appears to be a serious injury, perhaps even a tear. A worst-case-scenario diagnosis might well rule the striker for the rest of the season. And with West Ham’s first-half performance against West Brom so jubilant, so spritzed with attacking flurries, the news hits twice as hard. Sakho’s return to the starting line up catalysed the first cogent attacking performance in some time from the Hammers, and with only Andy Carroll and Nikica Jelavic available now, a return to incoherence beckons. Neither Jelavic nor Carroll have shown any indication that they can provide the movement and interplay that Manuel Lanzini – unquestionably West Ham’s star man now, in the absence of Payet – needs to work with. Perhaps Mauro Zarate will play as a striker against United; he, at least, showed in that first half against West Brom that he and Lanzini can have, at times, an intuitive connection. He is also quite handy over a dead ball.
The message is loud and clear; lower your expectations, people. This match will likely not be one to linger long in the memory, just like this unwell period for both squads. Convalescing is never a time to cherish, and although the manner in which the points might be wrestled this weekend may not be mouth-watering, there is much to be said for teams that can rally when they’re wounded. Wounded these teams are, and we’ll consider ourselves lucky to be treated with anything more than a 0-0.
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