I spend the last part of yesterday afternoon watching the EFL cup final which saw Manchester United beat Southampton 3-2. Southampton were desperately unlucky: they had what would have been an opening goal disallowed for offside when it wasn’t, and were the better team for most of the game. Having gone down 2-0 I expected them to give up but they came right back into it with a goal from their new signing Manolo Gabbiadiani each side of half time.
The Southampton players were fit, fast, and strong and caused the Man Utd defence no end of trouble. Gabbiadiani was bought at the end of January for £15m, which even a short time ago would have been a lot of money. In my post on Jurgen Klopp I said:
[T]he English Premier League is an altogether different arena where you have five or six big, well-funded clubs all vying for the top spots plus another ten or twelve clubs who have plenty of money (thanks to the lucrative TV deals) to employ a squad of fit, motivated, highly-professional players who are paid handsomely.
That last part well describes Southampton yesterday. The days of a “big” club being able to steamroll a lesser club in a match are not quite gone, but they are a lot harder to come by. Southampton lost yesterday mainly because of some good saves from David De Gea, a lot of luck which went the way of Man Utd, and the sublime skills of Zlatan Ibrahimovic (ably assisted by a wonderful, inch-perfect cross from Ander Herrera).
Zlatan has always been a controversial player and has more clubs under his belt than Tiger Woods. I always thought he’d do well in the Premier League, mainly because of his physicality and the fact that Scandinavians are suited to English football. Before he arrived at Manchester there was a lot of talk among an excited media about whether he would be a team player, if his ego would get the better of him, whether he would cause trouble in the dressing room, or if he was too old to go through another season with another 30+ goal tally. I was optimistic, mainly because it was Mourinho who was hiring him and they worked together well at Inter Milan a few years back. Every great team (and Man Utd are not a great team, but they hope to be) needs a star player with a big ego but managing that player is crucial. If anyone could manage Zlatan, it was Mourinho.
And boy, has he proved his doubters wrong. Those goals he scored yesterday put his tally for the season at 26: even if we ignore everything else, he is doing what he is paid to do and then some. At times he seems to be carrying the team, certainly insofar as his strike partners are concerned. But what has surprised everyone is his attitude on and off the pitch: he seems to have matured into somewhat of a role-model for the younger players around him, and all the talk is that he is a huge influence in the dressing room in terms of his work rate, positive attitude, and desire to win. Who saw that coming? He has carried with him the reputation of being a troublemaker his whole career, but in Manchester he seems to be the exact opposite. Sure, he still has a giant ego and talks about himself a lot, but he does so these days with a huge, ironic grin on his face and, as one of the commentators pointed out, when you are scoring goals like he does then he can get away with it. And I noticed yesterday in the post-match interview he stressed that the win was a team effort and wasn’t down to him alone. He’s actually quite a classy bloke these days. Good for him.
The contrast with Paul Pogba couldn’t be more different. Pogba talks the talk like Zlatan but, as the saying goes, doesn’t walk the walk. He was useless yesterday: gave the ball away in midfield, lost his man when he was on defensive duties, and created very little going forward. Pogba swaggers around as if he is the biggest name at the club, and perhaps he is, but there is no doubt who the biggest performer is. I am extremely sorry that Zlatan is 35 and not 30, because the prospect of him settling in for another 3-4 seasons would be mouth-watering. Pogba, unless he bucks his ideas up, may as well clear off to PSG or somewhere.
“Southampton were desperately unlucky: they had what would have been an opening goal disallowed for offside when it wasn’t,”
I know zip about your football, but if this happened in the NBA or the NFL I would suspect ‘bad luck’ wasn’t necessarily the reason for the bad call.
Teams like Southampton may be good in all sorts of ways but they still tend to ‘freeze’ more on big occasions like cup finals. The irritating thing about the ManUres is they seem better equipped mentally to push things harder, or more effectively, at the last hurdle than teams who are still slightly overawed by words like ‘final’ and ‘big trophy cabinet.’
By the way, just how much is someone with a Yugoslavian name really Scandinavian? A lot of me thinks he is still mostly Slav who happened to be born in the socialist paradise of Sweden.
By the way, just how much is someone with a Yugoslavian name really Scandinavian?
He’s obviously of immigrant stock and apparently grew up in an area dominated by former-Yugoslavs, but in his defence he has always considered himself Swedish and is by all accounts fully integrated.