There might come a time this season when Manchester United’s miserable 2023/24 Premier League season will be consigned to history. We’ll stop talking about it, stop using it as a tool for comparison. It suddenly won’t feel all that relevant.
For now, with the second stage of the Erik ten Hag era still in its infancy, it’s going to condition how we view this team. It’s the prism through which United are being judged early in the campaign.
And if the judgements on the opening weekend were encouraging, this was more of a concern. It wasn’t quite the collapse we associated United with so often last season. For a lot of the afternoon, they were harder to play against, more structured and more controlled. But they can’t kick the addiction to chaos.
