Straight
It was the great triumph of a team that is still small.
Manchester United added three points again to finish redoing its bad start to the season.
The new relief, the second consecutive victory, came in Southampton in full swing, with the club focused on the market and on the debut of Casemiro, who jumped onto the field to play the last quarter of an hour and narrow spaces and balls before the push of a rival who submitted him for several minutes.
Southampton deserved more, physical, vigorous, daring.
But United won with a goal from Bruno Fernandes early in the second half.
SOUSouthampton
0
Gavin Bazunu, Kyle Walker-Peters, Moussa Djenepo (Romain Perraud, min. 88), Mohammed Salisu, Armel Kotchap, Armstrong (Sékou Mara, min. 76), Joe Aribo (Lyanco, min. 88), Mohammed Elyounoussi (Armstrong, min 62), Romeo Lavia, Ward-Prowse and Che Adams
MNU M.United
1
De Gea, Varane, Diogo Dalot, Lisandro Martínez, Tyrell Malacia, Bruno Fernandes, McTominay, Jadon Sancho (Cristiano, min. 67), Anthony Elanga (Casemiro, min. 79), Eriksen (Fred, min. 91) and Rashford
Goals
0-1 min.
54: Bruno Fernandes.
Referee
Andy Madley
Yellow cards Diogo Dalot (min. 49), McTominay (min. 82) and Fred (min. 95)
Two wins later, that Manchester United disaster at Brentford seems far away.
Nothing is further from reality.
Everything was stirred with those four goals that precipitated the investment by Casemiro and sent the two most expensive pieces of the squad to the bench, Cristiano Ronaldo and Harry Maguire, the highly criticized central defender who now remains unpublished while Varane takes flight.
Among the calamities that manager Ten Hag had suffered in Brentford, there was one that particularly hurt him and that was reflected in the game's statistics sheet.
Between all the players of the modest London team they had traveled almost 14 kilometers more than those of the giant Manchester pomegranate.
Furious, Ten Hag summoned the squad on what should have been his day off to make them go around a training camp,
CR left the eleven, pending as they are all of an eventual departure from the club.
Ten Hag wants to redouble defensive efforts and poses them as a collective duty.
Their forwards chase and in Southampton they did it more than ever because the team did not have the ball, lacked the tools to manage it in the face of the rival's voracity, which bears the signature of the strategist Ralph Hasenhüttl, a guy that Ralf Ragnick once took to Leipzig after dazzling with the modest Ingolstadt, where he introduced a style of play of intensive and continuous pressure on the rival in any sector of the field.
United suffered an ordeal in the face of so much aggressiveness, but at least they knew how to get together and struggle.
He scorned ball handling in order to avoid turnovers in sensitive places, where Southampton wanted to win the ball back and shoot at De Gea.
Eriksen, who was fading, offered him some way out and the team found, in an episodic action, the option to get ahead on the scoreboard in a bizarre play in which the goalkeeper and local defenders took up to four balls from the goal line.
Southampton has several tigers in the team, youngsters who will soon give continuity to the club's strategy, skilled at finding pearls in the market and then extracting juicy capital gains from them.
Gareth Bale, Sadio Mané, Luke Shaw, Dejan Lovren, Peter Crouch or Virgil Van Dijk came out of there.
The next to do so may be the Ghanaian Mohammed Salisu, who arrived from Valladolid for 12 million euros, and Armel Bella-Kotchap, a 20-year-old son of a former Cameroonian international who was captured this summer from Bochum after an agreement for 10 million.
His performance against United was dazzling, but he could not prevent the goal that decided the game, a Bruno Fernandes arrival after Dalot's cross.
Undetectable for the center-backs, the Portuguese talent also demonstrated his technique by impaling a shot that was not easy.
The goal invited Manchester United to redouble their resistance.
Ten Hag called Cristiano Ronaldo in the 67th minute to leave him off the hook while waiting for a counterattack that never came.
Salisu and Bella-Kotchap did not give the Portuguese star a ball, who left the game upset after being outsprinted and missing a couple of simple passes.
Casemiro had more dictation in just a quarter of an hour, time in which he joined a double pivot with McTominay, in theory the man who should take over in the starting eleven.
The Brazilian entered the game like the sailor who leaves the cabin and finds a shipwreck, he took the buckets that his companions already had and began to bail out water.
In the end his team stayed afloat, in the first game of the season in which he did not concede a goal.
“We have learned the lesson from Brentford”,
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