On the eve of Manchester United’s eagerly anticipated return to Champions League action against BSC Young Boys tonight, you’d have to hope the result will be nothing more than a foregone conclusion. Young Boys, whilst winning their Swiss Super League emphatically last year by over thirty points, are nothing more than just that – a Swiss Super League side.
United, on the other hand, have far grander aspirations this year, with the first real promise of significant silverware in the offing since Fergie left. The past summer’s signings have not only raised morale around the club but the expectations around the fanbase too. A window of Jadon Sancho, Raphaël Varane and Cristiano Ronaldo is the stuff off a 14-year-olds FIFA career mode.
The juxtaposition in the feeling around the club between the days following that night in Gdańsk and the feeling now mere weeks into the new season is mental. But in the same way it all changed so quickly for the good, the same could equally happen in the opposite way. A loss in our opening Champions League fixture away to a European minnow would almost certainly lead to half of the fanbase pressing the panic button, subsequently triggering yet more weeks of laborious lamenting at our lack of a defensive midfielder.
Regardless of the result today, I can’t help but feel the confidence and feel-good factor is still paper-thin and always will be until we actually win something. The teams we expect to be around us, come crunch time at the end of the season, all have proven managers and proven squads. Chelsea have just won the Champions League; City, whilst disappointing in Europe, have dominated domestically for years and have just won the Premier League and Liverpool have won both the League and Champions League in recent times.
We don’t have the same pedigree as the teams around us and I’m not sure if we have the staying power to outlast all three of them to win a league title. The Champions League is a different entity altogether however, Frank Lampard’s lacklustre Chelsea topped their group with ease and before they even got around to playing Atlético Madrid in the first round of the knockout stages they had a dip in form; sacked Lampard as a result; hired Thomas Tuchel as a replacement and turned their form around. In how many competitions can you sack a manager for poor performance halfway through and still go onto convincingly win that very same competition?
Maybe that’s just a Chelsea thing though.
Obviously, if United aren’t favourites for the Premier League then they certainly aren’t going to be favourites for the Champions League don’t get me wrong, but the volatile nature of European Football may just give us a chance. Let’s not sell ourselves short either though by the way, our squad is genuinely up there as one of the best in the world and we should be competing for the big trophies. I’m just an eternal pessimist, brutally scarred by the countless false dawns we’ve had down the years post-Fergie.
That being said though, I think our top-heavy and partially bipolar squad is better suited to Cup Football at the moment, rather than League Football, especially given the abolition of the away goals rule. With Ronaldo coming in as well with his goalscoring and European track-record, United have the firepower to blast their way through rounds they might otherwise have come up short at.
We’re not in any position, as United fans, to turn our noses up at any trophy, no matter how big or small, given our four-year trophy drought. But an FA Cup just doesn’t constitute success for this Manchester United team anymore; the time to win a second-rate trophy was last year or the year before, we’re now into Solskjær’s third full season in charge and with the acquisition of proper players comes the implementation of proper standards.
None of this, “we’ve done well to get to a semi-final or final but we’re not going to bother winning it” nonsense anymore, we’ve got to start winning big things not just challenging for small things. Louis van Gaal’s FA Cup triumph wasn’t even given the dignity of a single night of celebration before he was sacked, never mind lauded as the catalyst to a new era of prosperity at the club. We need bigger and better than this now.
It feels very much to me like we’re getting into sink or swim territory for Solskjær now; the manager has been the one primarily responsible for taking us to where we are now, for allowing us to dream again and he deserves credit for that but will it take someone else to make that dream a reality? There’s been a lot of speculation as to whether Solskjær is the man to get us over the line or simply the man to put us in the position to.
That all remains to be seen but his best chance to win that elusive first trophy, and a trophy that would be an actual indicator of a club on the rise, is the Champions League, in my opinion. We’ve shown we can beat superior teams in one-off games and punch above our weight under Solskjær before, so why not do it in the Champions League?
Regardless of the result tonight we should be topping our group with relative ease and start striving for glory not just staving off embarrassment.
Whether it be in the Champions League or the Premier League, it’s time to get serious.