Saturday was a shithouse of a day. It began with a real-life version of Schrödinger’s cat. Not something you expect to encounter outside a physics classroom, and certainly not something you want to encounter in your own front room.
Our cat, Eric, had been ill for a couple of weeks. He was 19, a grand old age, and on Friday evening he’d been curled up in the front room looking very much like a cat who was approaching the end. When we woke on Saturday morning, I told the kids not to go downstairs. I’d go first. I’d open the front room door and see whether he was still with us.
For those unfamiliar with Schrödinger’s cat, it’s a thought experiment in which a cat is sealed in a box and, until someone opens it, is theoretically both alive and dead. It’s a way of illustrating the peculiarities of quantum mechanics. I’m sure a physicist would take issue with that explanation, but they’ll have to get in the queue.
For a few moments, before I opened the door, there were two possible versions of Saturday morning. In one, Eric was still alive. In the other, he wasn’t. Unfortunately, it was the latter.
And after that, frankly, Manchester United were going to have to do something pretty special to improve my mood. Spoiler alert: they didn’t. But there’s something of Schrödinger’s cat about United’s season. Somewhere, in some parallel universe, there’s a Manchester United side enjoying a pretty respectable start to the campaign.
In that universe, United held on against Everton at the Hill Dickinson Stadium instead of conceding a last-minute equaliser. In that universe, Manchester City weren’t awarded another sham goal in the derby, and Bryan Mbeumo might even have scored a last-minute winner. And in that universe, the referee didn’t find eight minutes of added time against Tottenham, allowing United to record a desperately needed victory.
You can almost see that version of United, can’t you? A team with a bit of momentum, a bit of confidence, perhaps even a bit of optimism. Unfortunately, somebody keeps opening the bloody box. And every time they do, we’re still shit. Because whatever alternative realities we might care to construct, the reality at Old Trafford on Saturday was there for everyone to see. United were absolutely abject, particularly in the opening half-hour. It was the sort of performance you watch through your fingers, cringing at what might happen next. Talking of cats, it was a bit like that video doing the rounds from Yorkshire Wildlife Park on Saturday, involving a tiger and that mauling.
In fact, if anyone from the club’s media department is preparing a highlights package of those first 30 minutes, it should probably carry a parental advisory warning: Spuds mauled us. Tottenham. Lads, it’s Tottenham.
And yet they looked stronger, quicker, fitter, more confident than us. United, by contrast, looked slow, ponderous, disorganised and entirely devoid of ideas. There was no urgency, no apparent plan and precious little energy.
I watched the match with an Arsenal supporter, which added an interesting dimension to proceedings. He was absolutely furious. With United. He hates Tottenham with a similar sort of passion to the way I loathe Liverpool, and he’d turned up assuming United would do the decent thing and give the Spuds a right old battering. Instead, he spent the first half shouting at our players for their inability to string together two passes, win a tackle or even look remotely competent.
The extraordinary thing was that he seemed much angrier than I was. He was experiencing the shock of seeing United play like this. I was experiencing the weary familiarity of it. Occasional United watchers still seem to retain some residual expectation that we’re United and will therefore behave like United. Those of us who watch every week have long since had that particular illusion beaten out of us. This season at least.
We did eventually improve. Mbeumo gave us the lead, Spurs went down to ten men, and for a brief, tantalising period it appeared that United might actually win a football match. Then came the added time. Eight bloody minutes. And we all just knew: Solanke – who has basically had one half-good season in his entire career – equalised, Tottenham escaped with a point, and United managed to turn what should have been a victory against ten-man opponents into another exercise in misery.
Of course, in a different reality, the final whistle might have blown before Spurs scored. In another, United might have defended competently. But neither of those realities is much use when you’re standing in Old Trafford looking at the scoreboard.
There was, at least, one welcome sight in the Stretford End. The ticker banner is back.
The number, of course, is not one that everyone will agree with. Particularly those across town who have developed a rather flexible relationship with the concept of sporting legitimacy. But that’s the point of a banner like this. It’s a gigantic, gloriously spiteful reminder that football supporters possess long memories and an excellent capacity for holding grudges.
Which brings me to Sunday: Liverpool against city at Anfield. Ordinarily, this is a fixture where I want both sides to lose, preferably in some spectacular and humiliating fashion with a shit-tonne of injuries and red cards. But before kick-off, against all the accumulated wisdom of my, ahem, considerable number of years on this planet, I found myself thinking that I actually wanted Liverpool to win.
I know. I was as surprised as anyone. Then they started singing You’ll Never Walk Alone, and the spell was broken. Within about 30 seconds I remembered precisely why I’d spent the best part of my life disliking Liverpool Football Club, and shortly afterwards I switched the idiot box off. I did think the atmosphere was strangely subdued, too. Given everything surrounding City, I’d expected Anfield to be absolutely vicious. A sustained, furious, relentless assault from the stands. Instead, what I saw before abandoning the spectacle seemed rather more restrained than I’d anticipated.
After a while, curiosity got the better of me. I picked up my phone and typed a question into its AI assistant:
“What’s the Liverpoo v Cheats score?”
And here’s the funny thing. It knew. No request for clarification. No suggestion that I might have misspelled something. No polite enquiry as to which football club I was referring to when I said “Cheats”. It knew exactly who I meant. Reader, I cannot tell you how satisfying I found this.
I then spent a thoroughly unproductive half-hour trying to goad the AI into saying something genuinely vicious about city. Unfortunately, it proved irritatingly determined to remain measured, balanced and unwilling to descend to my level. Which, to be fair, is a level that most responsible organisations would be advised to avoid.
But the important thing wasn’t what it refused to say. It was what it understood without being told. We’ve reached the point where you can type “Cheats” into a conversation about Premier League football and even artificial intelligence can work out which club you’re talking about.
City won 3–0, incidentally. Which raises another Schrödinger’s cat question. Did the match even happen? Or, more accurately, will it eventually be treated as though it mattered? The blue goons have been found guilty of breaches of the Premier League’s financial rules, with the decision under appeal. What any final consequences might mean for titles, records or the wider history of English football remains to be seen.
Somewhere in the great quantum football universe, perhaps there’s a version of this season in which City’s results stand, and another in which the whole thing is eventually unpicked. I suppose we’ll find out when somebody finally opens that particular box.
Meanwhile, United have three away games in the space of eight days. First up is Atlético Madrid on Tuesday in the Champions League. Diego Simeone’s side are not renowned for their chilled approach to the game. If we start that game as we started against Tottenham, the tiger footage from Yorkshire Wildlife Park might begin to look like it’s that kids wildlife show with Michaela Strachan.
Then it’s Leeds on Sunday, at the skip-hire stadium, where we’ll encounter another team who are likely to run much faster and harder than we do. They ran all over us at Old Trafford last season, and the similarities are worrying: another long break, another opportunity for United to emerge refreshed, reorganised and ready to go, and another performance suggesting we were anything but.
Then, to round off the week, Como away: a trip to the Italian lakes ought to be a pleasant experience. Unfortunately, this involves United playing football, which tends to spoil things.
There was a time when you could look at three fixtures like these and reasonably expect United to win at least a couple. Now, given our away form, you find yourself wondering whether we’ll lose all three. There are, naturally, other possible realities. We might turn up in Madrid and produce a magnificent performance. We might go to Leeds and rediscover our appetite for a fight. We might even win in Como. But based on what we’ve actually seen, rather than what we might wish to imagine, it’s difficult to summon much enthusiasm.
And perhaps that’s what makes this version of United so depressing. It’s not simply that we’re losing matches or dropping points. It’s that so much of it feels inevitable. The slowness. The lack of intensity. The failure to impose ourselves. The sense that the opposition have worked harder, prepared better and want it more.
It becomes exhausting, watching a club that once represented possibility become a weekly exercise in managing expectations.
I’ll finish, though, where Saturday began, with Eric. He was named, of course, after King Eric. Cantona. Our number seven. The man who seemed to arrive at Old Trafford and change not just a football team, but the entire atmosphere around the place. A player who made you believe that something extraordinary might happen every time he touched the ball.
Our Eric was 19. He’d been part of the family for almost two decades, through all the changes and upheavals that life brings. He was a constant, a familiar presence, and on Saturday morning he was gone.
It’s strange how football and life become entangled. You name a cat after a footballer you love, and almost twenty years later, when you lose him, you find yourself thinking about that footballer again. About what he represented. About what United used to be.
I worry that we’re becoming a club that has to keep returning to the past for comfort, because the present offers so little. But there are some memories worth holding on to: the halcyon days of Eric. Both of them.
Here’s Eric, playing football with a meatball.