Author: Herzog’s Child

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Manchester United’s early ascension to the top of the premier league may not be revealing in itself, but the swagger and rapidity with which they’ve done so has cast eyebrows aloft. The opening day away defeat of West Brom may have been more customary than stylistically enamouring, but what followed, the sweeping aside of Spurs and the relentless blitzkrieg on Arsenal, bewildered as much as pleased all revelling reds. The kids were more than all right. The subsequent trouncing of Bolton, a notoriously snappy opponent, was a mere continuation of United’s early promise. There was no ill-form or comedown from the patently annoying International break. United’s stealthy counter-attacking and warming finesse smacked not of a team treading lightly into a new season, but one already gnashing its way into early battle.

Gone, of course, are the aged stars of Gary Neville, Paul Scholes, and Edwin van der Sar, and with them, too, a stockpile of dead-wood: O’Shea, Bebe, Obertan, Brown and, literally in this case, Owen Hargreaves. Age cannot be restrained and time for the dispensable recedes. It was not an overhaul, per se, but last season’s struggles more than paved way for the necessity of something new; what was needed, as was blatantly obvious, was a little more of a little more: urgency; pace; fearlessness. The essence of the United that cemented its history and ethos.