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Rob Dawson, reporter
MANCHESTER, England – After an international break filled with controversy and club statements, Manchester United got a chance to let their football do the talking. Instead of taking a positive step forward to help steady the ship, Erik ten Hag and his team were thrown into further crisis at the hands of Brighton & Hove Albion.
Roberto De Zerbe’s side won 3-1 to end United’s 31-match unbeaten run at Old Trafford in their first match since Jadon Sancho was sacked as first-team coach and Anthony was placed on leave amid allegations of abuse of the winger. Brighton were the last team to win a Premier League match here more than a year ago and have now beaten United in their past four league meetings.
United were without Sancho, Anthony and injured duo Raphael Varane and Mason Mount, but Brighton won despite the absence of Pervis Estopinan, Solly March and Julio Enciso, while only Billy Gilmour and Evan Ferguson were named on the bench. De Zerbe selected a starting XI that cost a £17m transfer fee to put together, almost a quarter of the £73m United paid Borussia Dortmund to sign Sancho in 2021.
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Amidst all this, there was the first murmur of opposition fans targeting Ten Hag with loud boos throughout the stadium when the Dutch coach replaced Rasmus Hoglund with Anthony Martial at 2-0. After that, Ten Hag brushed it aside, just as he did on Friday when his press conference was dominated by questions about his public row with Sancho.
The manager insists he is only interested in things happening on the pitch, but the performance wasn’t much better than the chaos away from the actual football.
It’s now three defeats from five games, and even two wins – against Wolverhampton Wanderers and Nottingham Forest – have come thanks to disappointing performances from their opponents. Forest led 2-0 inside four minutes before losing 3-2, and when Brighton scored their second goal here it was the first time United had conceded multiple goals in four successive league games since 1979.
Ten Hag’s first season was full of highs and lows, but for the most part, they kept a clean sheet at Old Trafford and won their home games. And now, it seems they can’t even do that.
“We have to be disappointed and very upset with ourselves because the demand at United is to win games,” Ten Hag said after the match. “We started well, created chances, and in the second one of them and the first chance, they were scored. Then we have to do better with that setback. This is the stage we are in at the moment. You have to look in the mirror.” Look at yourself and we have to get better.”
Since Sir Alex Ferguson retired in 2013, managers in charge of filling the manager’s position have found that things can fall apart very quickly. Ten Hag can only hope that he can mastermind his way back in a way that David Moyes, Louis van Gaal, Jose Mourinho, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Ralf Rangnick failed to do.
It won’t get any easier with a Champions League trip to Bayern Munich on Wednesday followed by a tough match at Turf Moor against Burnley three days later. United need to win from somewhere and they need it quickly.
“It’s about personality, now we have to see how strong we are, how the team sticks together and which players stand up and lead the team,” Ten Hag added. “Bayern Munich are one of the favorites to win the Champions League, so we have to be good there and I have already shown that we need character, belief, resilience and determination, for sure.”
It might have been different here had VAR not ruled out a first-half equaliser, when the ball was ruled to be out of play before Marcus Rashford crossed for Hoylund to score, but there was nothing fortunate about Brighton’s win.
Their goals came on the counter-attack, but this was not a powerful shot. Brighton had more possession, had more shots on target, and could have scored more. The afternoon was summed up by the Brighton fans in the corner of the pitch who, during a spell of United pressure in stoppage time, began singing, “We want our ball back.”
There were small positives for Ten Hag, such as his side’s lively start, Rashford’s performance and Hannibal’s first goal for the club, but they were few and far between.
It says everything about how things turned out for United that Brighton’s first goal was scored by one of their former players, Danny Welbeck. The goal, well executed from the right and featuring a clever dummy from Adam Lallana, equaled Brighton’s club record of scoring in 16 consecutive away games.
That’s where these two teams are: Brighton, a club on the rise despite losing key players over the summer, are setting club records while United are making history for all the wrong reasons. After all the off-field woes, the only statistic that really matters is that United lost three of their first five games for the first time in the Premier League era.
