Few will ever forget our meeting with Leicester early on this season but just in case you’ve repressed the memory in some kind of act of post-traumatic self-preservation, they beat us 5-3 in one of the most ridiculous matches I’ve seen us play since Southampton beat us 6-3 way back in the days when Southampton were more likely to be seen hovering around the relegation zone and not in the top three of the Premier League.
On that occasion, we somewhat bizarrely blamed the grey shirts we were wearing.
In the 5-3 defeat against Leicester, we could offer no such excuses. It was just a poor, poor performance.
It didn’t start that way, though. I was watching the match on TV and when Di Maria put us 2-0 up with little more than a quarter of an hour played, the camera panned to Nigel Pearson who seemed to have a look on his face that said, “What the hell do I do about this?”
He needn’t have worried though because such was our kami-kaze defending at that point that less than a minute later they were back in it at 2-1.
With just under an hour gone, sanity was restored when we went 3-1 up through Herrera and at that stage, all were expecting us to close the game out but this is a new Manchester United, one where no one comes down to the touchline and gives players any instruction and what happened next was simply hellish for anyone associated with Manchester United as we were dismantled time and time again as Leicester knocked in four goals without reply to run out comfortable 5-3 winners.
As high as anyone associated with Leicester might have been on that day, they’ve been made to suffer a lot of lows since and just two points from their next thirteen matches left them rock bottom of the Premier League.
Meanwhile, we finished 2014 strongly and, for a brief period, there were even whispers that we might even get back into the title race but several dropped points in recent matches have surely put paid to any such thing and we now seem to have our work cut out to finish in the top four (or, preferably, top three).
I did mention in the pre-match comments before our FA Cup tie against Cambridge that we appear to have lost our way a little recently.
Defensively, we’re looking slightly less shambolic and have been conceding few goals but this all seems to have come at the cost of attacking intent and some of the old habits from last season are creeping back into our game (sideways and backwards passing, anyone?) and a Manchester United that has forgotten how to attack is an abomination.
However, I like to think that we’ve just had a mid-season lull – every team has a below-par period at some point of the season – and that, unlike last season, we’ll now push on from here until the end of the season.
I think we’ll win today but I think siding with Leicester in the Asian Handicap might be the safest option until United show that they know the way to the opposing goal again…