There’s an entire thesis to be written about Luton Town’s home games this season.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!While the visit of Manchester United ended in another narrow defeat, they’ve now completed the full set of giving the Premier League’s big beasts a deeply uncomfortable afternoon or evening, while also rolling over so, so disappointingly in their actual biggest home game of the season against Sheffield United.
There’s so much at play there. Expectation an obvious one. The challenge of having all of the ball and having to carve out chances rather than the space to operate the bigger sides will always allow Luton while focusing on their own football.
But a big factor in this specific example was also Manchester United’s increasingly cartoonish failure to kill off a game that appeared quite wrongly to be done and dusted after seven minutes.
If we’re talking expectation and confidence and different kinds of pressure, it’s worth looking at those seven minutes in greater detail too, and not just because they did in the end just about end up being decisive.
Rasmus Hojlund, full of confidence and scoring for fun, bagged himself a couple of goals he quite simply would not have in the first half of the season. Not because he wasn’t capable, but because he just wouldn’t have made the most of the situations that presented themselves.
He says he never doubted himself, but 14 games without a goal after that big-money move does something to anyone. Would an unsure, goal-starved Hojlund make the hopeful first-minute run to even be in position to turn a shanked back-pass into a chance? Would that Hojlund have had the wherewithal and composure to notice Thomas Kaminski’s all-or-nothing positioning, a picture perfect example of Making The Striker’s Mind Up For Him? It only makes the striker’s mind up if that mind is clear. And nothing clears a mind like confidence.
Hojlund isn’t even the only example this season of a striker suddenly parlaying a drought-breaking goal into a significant run of them, but it’s always fascinating to watch. The deflection for the second goal is one million per cent a goal that never, ever happens for a striker in desperate need of one.
From that platform, a United side playing its best football of the season by quite some distance really should have seen the game out in relative comfort. But while United may be a far better side than they were a few months ago, they retain a startling capacity for, quite simply, being rather thick.
Having let Luton back into the game, they became enormously rattled. Bookings came unnecessarily fast and spectacularly thick. Vastly experienced players had to be hooked at half-time for their own good.
The second half cannot have been any kind of fun for anyone connected with Manchester United as the visitors carved out countless chances on the break – often once again featuring Kaminski’s seemingly batsh*t positioning for the challenges of a one-on-one – but time and again these chances were spurned.
And an invigorated Luton side playing with freedom and verve and skill remained a live threat right up to the moment Ross Barkley looped a header onto Andre Onana’s crossbar in the final added minute. That this chance came about at all owed a great deal to Bruno Fernandes deciding to shoot straight at Kaminski rather than keeping the ball in the corner with one minute to go, and meant the match ended with another example of this United team’s ability to be maddeningly and unnecessarily stupid.
How the second half remained goalless is a puzzle that will test the minds of football boffins for generations to come, but it produced the entirely pleasing outcome of Luton feeling desperately unlucky not to have nicked at least a point, United thinking they could and should have won by two or three in the end and both being absolutely correct. We’ve given it nowhere near sufficient thought, but it’s definitely our favourite goalless half of the season so far, especially given the way the goals went flying in during the first quarter-hour.
We’re still not really sure quite what to make of United. The results are there now, that’s unarguable, and the shape of the side undoubtedly looks so, so much better. Hojlund, Alejandro Garnacho and Marcus Rashford is working a treat as a front three with Bruno Fernandes’ unique blend of scheming and moaning doing plenty of important work behind and around that front three.
Behind that it still doesn’t really convince. But it may well be enough now to get United back into the top four such are the extent of current frailties elsewhere while the top three saunter clear of the pack. Manager and players are right now buying themselves time at the very least. There is recognisable purpose and planning, and no longer the sense that every corner turned leads them down another blind alley.
The gap to Tottenham and potential Champions League qualification is down to three points and it’s a gap United should feel confident of overturning. It would still be only a bare minimum passing grade of a season, but it’s a lot better than has appeared likely for most of an ill-tempered and troubled campaign for a team still beset by flaws.
As for Luton, they – as Peter Drury put it – have made sure not to waste a single one of Kenilworth Road’s big occasions. That they still had nothing to show for it stings a little harder than it would have had Sheffield United been dealt with.
