Benjamin Sesko stood alone and transfixed at Craven Cottage after a 1-1 draw, appearing consumed rather than merely disappointed. The 22-year-old expensive signing faces the expectation to score and to architect an attacking identity for Manchester United. The team shows clear offensive dysfunction and uncertainty about how to generate goals or an attacking rhythm. The match atmosphere was stifling and characterful, with quaint west London surroundings and an excessively high-pitched public address system. Longstanding talk of a culture shift at Manchester United has become a question of whether the team can actually score goals anymore.
How strange to be Sesko right now, aged 22 and a few months, a 73m footballer, thrown into the meat grinder and asked not just to play and score goals for Manchester United, but to fix them too, to work out exactly how this 1bn cutandshut job of a team, hurled into a nonnegotiable shape by a supremely confident man in white trainers, are actually going to do this.
Craven Cottage had been clammy with late summer heat before kick-off, looking as ever like the kind of place American movies imagine all English football is played, quaint west London terrace houses, chintzy wooden seats, Hugh Grant in a pink shirt. Not to mention a mind-numbingly highpitched pre-match public address system, the kind of thing the CIA might have used to smoke out a 1980s Central American dictator from his mansion.
For years the talk has been about culture shift around Manchester United. And there was a new dynamic here, the question no longer whether Manchester United will win the Premier League again, but whether Manchester United will ever actually score a goal. Have they ever scored one? There is a folk memory of United scoring goals. We have photos, grainy films.
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