From Noble to Mourinho: Winners and losers and West Ham add to Man Utd’s woes

In a stunning early afternoon of football, West Ham smashed Manchester United 3-1.

That makes it seven points out of the last nine available for the Irons, as Manuel Pellegrini’s men continued their ascension. Manchester United look well and truly on the slide. Who were the winners and losers?

Winner: Mark Noble

This is Mark Noble’s 15th season at West Ham. 15. He’s played over 400 games for his beloved Irons. To put it into context, when Mark Noble first played Manchester United, Marlon Harewood was up-front for the Hammers and Noble had to contend with a United midfield containing Paul Scholes, Alan Smith, Darren Fletcher and Ji-Sung Park.

Times have certainly changed, but Noble has remained the same. And he has finally been part of a side that has genuinely spanked United (he missed the 4-0 EFL Cup win in 2010). All of Noble’s previous wins over United have been by one goal and came after a hard fight.

This time, though? West Ham cruised to victory and Noble was absolutely stupendous. With Declan Rice manning the base of midfield, Noble was unleashed and, against a lacklustre United midfield he ran riot.

No, seriously, Mark Noble ran the game with the effortless elegance of a Xavi or Iniesta. He was turning away from United players with almost insulting ease, pinching the ball back intelligently and threading through-balls like nobody’s business. Noble’s display was bookended by two wonderful slide-rule passes, the first to set Pablo Zabaleta away to create the first goal – and the second to cleave the United defence in two and put Marko Arnautovic through to score the third.

Loser: José Mourinho’s tactics

3-5-2 is a fine formation, especially if you have good, mobile strikers and no real wingers. Manchester United’s current squad fit the formation down to the ground, yet 3-5-2 is just a shell. If you don’t plug the right pieces into the positions, it can be useless.

The whole point of 3-5-2 is that your midfielders are dynamic and move the ball quickly; and two of United’s midfielders were Marouane Fellaini and Nemanja Matic, neither of whom can move the ball quickly with any regularity.

What’s more is both men can’t really defend space all that well and are too easy to bypass with the ball. So what happened at The London Stadium was that West Ham’s midfielders ended up looking like Barcelona, moving the ball with alarming ease around an increasingly immobile United. This conditioned the entire match, as The Red Devils couldn’t generate any attacking momentum (e.g. no one moved for Pogba when he had the ball) and damn sure couldn’t protect their own defence.

Also, on a purely tactical level, playing Scott McTominay in defence over Nemaja Matic (clearly he had to play a midfielder there – more on that later) made no sense. Neither is a centre-back, but Matic has the advantage of being left-footed and thus able to occupy that troublesome left channel, letting Victor Lindelof play more comfortably on his right side. Mourinho can’t even do petty right!

Then then of course when it came time to make a change and try to get back into the game, Mourinho obviously took off McTominay to replace him with a better midfielder and switch to a four-man defence, right? Wrong. Oh sure, United switched to a four-man back-line, but they took Victor Lindelof from the pitch, leaving McTominay in defence still. And so of course when West Ham needed to slice United in half to create their third goal, they once again found McTominay easy pickings.

Winner: Felipe Anderson

The Brazilian is a magnificent footballer. For years he was linked with Manchester United, only for The Red Devils to fail to make good on their interest in him. He continued to build his reputation with Lazio, showcasing his excellent dribbling and creative skills. He’s begun to perform for West Ham, but he needed a signature performance.

This was his signature performance, the performance that announced him as the real deal. Obviously he’s played well before, but to so repeatedly toy with a side as massive as Manchester United (even if they are terrible right now) and deliver the Hammers’ first two-goal league win over The Red Devils since 1982. Mark Noble wasn’t even born yet, let alone Felipe Anderson!

What made it Anderson’s signature display? The stunning goal that set the Hammers on their way. A late run to the near-post saw the Brazilian brilliantly backheel Pablo Zabaleta’s cross past David De Gea and there, quick as a flash, United were behind and the Irons were on their way to victory.

Loser: José Mourinho’s man management

Imagine being so obstinate and weird that, even though you know a 3-5-2 is the best formation for your side, you refuse to pick your best centre-back because you’re currently unhappy with him because he didn’t rush back from injury last season – so you replace him with an average central midfielder.

That is obviously a ridiculous sentence, but then José Mourinho is a ridiculous man. His beef with Eric Bailly has always made no sense, but especially this season when he has embraced the idea of a back three it truly makes no sense to leave the Ivorian out. That alone would be enough to make his man-management a loser, but there’s more.

Body language can often be misleading in the cases of one individual on a pitch, but when the entire team (with the exception of the wing-backs) look like they’d rather be outside cycling or maybe enjoying the food court at Westfield, you have to wonder what the manager has been telling them in his team-talks. His decision to hook Paul Pogba with 20 minutes to go was as impressive a bit of scapegoating as you’ll see all season.

Winner: Manuel Pellegrini

Everyone laughed at Pellegrini at the start of the season, and then when the season started so slowly they laughed some more. But the Chilean is a man with a plan and always has been. He continued to work on his team, knowing that he only needed his players to grow accustomed to the system and his new signings to settle in.

Now that they have, West Ham have begun playing proper football. A week ago they utterly outplayed Chelsea only to fail to win because Marko Arnautovic wasn’t playing. Then they beat Macclesfield 8-0 (seriously!) Now the Austrian is back, West Ham’s style of play carries some punch. Obviously United are terrible, so the result shouldn’t be taken as definitive proof of West Ham’s arrival, but it shows that Pellegrini is genuinely building something at The London Stadium.

Loser: Manchester United

United currently sit 8th in the table, 8 points behind Liverpool at the top. And what’s more is they’ve played a game more, so you can expect that to jump to 11 if the Reds beat Chelsea, or jump to 9 if they lose and Manchester City beat Brighton as expected.

They have to sack José Mourinho now, right? United are struggling so much because of him. The man is an absolute disaster and the players are clearly unhappy playing for him. His tactics make no sense, his man-management is nonsense, he’s driving the club’s best player out of town and the side are genuinely awful to watch. He’s got to go, right?

Except, if they sack him, who comes in? They’ve already missed the chance to appoint the perfect candidate in Luis Enrique and now he’s spoken for. What club is going to let a manager of any quality go in the middle of the season? Can they really trust Nicky Butt and Michael Carrick to “man the shop” for the rest of the season? That’s one hell of a gamble with Champions League qualification on the line.

No matter which way you look at it, in both a literal and figurative sense, Manchester United lose.

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