Manchester United are sliding into the cold dark sea

Plus patience for Juventus and Cristiano Ronaldo and more in this week’s Tactically Naive.

Serie A is back. La Liga is back. Ligue 1 actually came back last week but we didn’t notice. Oops. Sorry about that. And so with the exception of the Bundesliga, which is taking an extended holiday after a difficult summer, we can safely say ...

Football is back, baby!

Take four of those big five European leagues. Rub them all over your face. Eat them in a sandwich. Drink them with a little umbrella. Oh yeah.

Of course not all football is football. Manchester City beating Huddersfield? Real Madrid and Barcelona both winning? Arsenal defending poorly? None of that’s football, except in the driest, most pedantic sense. It’s just things running as they should, the world ticking over. Dog bites man. Events, not news.

No, real football is when things happen on the field and then, by virtue of their strangeness or their sweetness, keep happening off it. Percolating on through the world, disturbing everybody’s equanimity in ways that might be good or bad but are certainly something. Maybe it takes a little investigation to find out why, exactly, that man bit that dog. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s just straightforwardly funny …

Manchester United are sliding into the cold dark sea

If Jose Mourinho’s time at Manchester United were a film, it would be Titanic. Not because it’s a story about a lot of vainglorious men sinking a hugely expensive project because they were all too stupid to think about doing anything else — though it is, of course, it absolutely is — but because we all knew, going in at the beginning, what was coming at the end.

Crash. Splash. Oh no. Oh dear.

And after a couple of seasons of ominous build-up, we may have an answer to the first important question: which team is the iceberg? If it does to turn out to be Brighton and Hove Albion, it’ll make a lot of sense. Glenn Murray and co. have a lot more going on beneath the surface than is immediately obvious, and on Sunday afternoon they delivered a two-hour masterclass on how to take apart overhyped, overrated, overpriced engineering.

Now comes the sinking, a long, slow process that will involve much backstabbing, betrayal, and general human indecency. Who will escape? Who will slip into the ocean, alone and unmissed? And perhaps most interestingly for the rest of the world, which cares little for Manchester United but enjoys watching them flail around: Who will make a spectacle of themselves in the process?

Some guesses: Mourinho will handcuff Paul Pogba to a radiator, but he probably won’t get away with it. He will then attempt to lock the rest of the squad below decks, and won’t get away with that either. Meanwhile Ed Woodward, carrying the shivering form of Anthony Martial, will earn himself a prime seat in the sturdiest lifeboat.

Most of the squad will escape icy oblivion as well, making it out of the wreckage bearing nothing more than a few scars, and any number of stories about their weird, old captain who said all those weird, old things, and simply would not change his course.

But poor Victor Lindelof will be lost. He will plummet downwards into fire and darkness, his screams fading. And then he’ll suddenly go pinwheeling off a propellor, and the whole cinema will laugh, feel a little guilty, and then laugh again.

Cristiano Ronaldo didn’t score any goals for Juventus

Which both is and isn’t a surprise. On the one hand, Ronaldo always scores. That’s his thing. And he didn’t do his thing. Not even once. Head to high ground.

But on the other, Juventus have taken the smoothest, most reliable title machine in the world and bolted a giant overclocked jet engine to the top — as such, everything’s bound to be a bit out of balance for a while.

There is an odd paradox at the heart of Ronaldo’s move to Juventus, a consequence perhaps of the fact that there are different rules for those that dwell on Olympus. His reputation, taken along with the purpose of the whole move, gives him the one thing that no big money, big name, big club-to-big club transfer ever gets these days. He has time.

He’s in Turin to win the Champions League, after all. And for clubs like Juventus, with squads this powerful and deep, that only starts to happen properly in March and April. If Ronaldo-in-Turin goes badly in the meantime, then yes, things could get messy. But if it goes merely okay, then … fine? Obviously there’ll be lots of furrowed brows and spilt ink. But it won’t really matter.

Because while Max Allegri attempts to find the most harmonious arrangement of Ronaldo, Paulo Dybala, Douglas Costa, Juan Cuadrado, and Mario Mandžukić, Juventus are still Juventus. They took the lead against Chievo, they went 2-1 down, and then they won anyway. Three points, job done. In your own time, Cristiano.

The Europa League is the best league (and it’s not even close)

Some sad news about this upcoming season: it may already have peaked. The qualifying rounds of the Europa League are frequently an exciting place, yet Europe’s weirdest competition may have finally achieved transcendance.

Last week, Dinamo Minsk, playing at home, beat Zenit St Petersberg 4-0. A pretty decent performance, all things considered, and a nice cushion to take into the second leg. After all, scoring four goals in 90 minutes is pretty rare, and … oh, that’s exactly what Zenit did.

Still, Zenit were by this point a man down. All Minsk had to do was keep their heads and score in extra time. Which they did, taking a 5-4 aggregate lead in the 99th minute. That gave them an away goal as well, and left Zenit with 21 minutes to score two goals … which they didn’t do.

They scored four.

8-1 on on the day. Six of those scored by a side with ten men, and four of those scored in the last 11 minutes. This included a hat-trick for Artem Dzyuba, who you may recall as the biggest and beefiest of Russia’s World Cup squad.

Hard to pick a stand out goal from such a selection, so we’re not going to bother: we’ll go for a foul instead. Tactically Naive’s Play of the Week is Maksim Shvyatsow’s trip right at the end here, a tired, heart-breaking gesture of absolute defeat.

Zito’s nutmeg corner

But is it art?