I like Jamie Carragher. He’s a superb pundit, a soccer obsessive, all the time participating. He seems good lurking round a lighted plinth in designer man-trainers ready to level at issues on a large display. He’s good for that Sky studio function: steeped in English club-football tradition, but additionally buzzing with modernity, tactical particulars, patterns you couldn’t beforehand see.
However I do suppose he’s incorrect about André Onana and the politics of shouting at Harry Maguire. In his newspaper column this week Carragher supplied a well-reasoned defence of Maguire, railing towards his standing as chief public whipping boy, with the sturdy central level that he ought to merely be rested for his personal good.
In the midst of which, for example of hateful mob behaviour, he talked about Onana shouting at Maguire throughout a pre-season pleasant. Carragher appears satisfied Onana was doing this to curry favour with United’s fans, enjoying to the gallery, showily distancing himself from the chief object of enmity.
It’s daring satirical stuff from Carragher. Very intentionally, and with an arch sense of dramatic irony, he’s after all doing precisely the identical factor Onana is accused of; placing his hand on Maguire’s shoulder towards the mob; and with the opposite hand beckoning the mob in to have a pop at Manchester United’s goalkeeper.
Be form! Don’t blame people! To make this level much more powerfully I’ll now explicitly blame Onana, who appeared to be doing OK at his new membership, however now stands accused of power unprofessionalism and sabotaging a senior teammate.
That is all very understanding and super-smart, and never in any approach contradictory. Simply as Milton created a Devil in Paradise Misplaced so seductively human the reader is actually tempted into sympathy, so Carragher is “performatively” embodying the vice he seeks to reveal. The phrase good will get thrown across the place. However that is deep, self-referential ethical satire. It’s high-risk inner dialogue. Plus the bit about doing Rigobert Music in coaching was actually good.
However I do nonetheless suppose he’s incorrect about Onana. First, as a result of that is simply the best way Onana performs. He likes to shout at and cajole his defenders. He did it on a regular basis at Internazionale. It’s presumably a part of the explanation United signed him and thus one thing his supervisor explicitly desires him to do.
He’s additionally hardly alone in being showy with it. Jordan Pickford by no means stops with these items. Conor Coady spent his whole worldwide debut, actually from the primary second, yelling at his teammates in a deserted stadium in Denmark. The entire English leader-legend trope is a sort of efficiency, for the advantage of followers, supervisor, teammates, private mythology.
Why single out Onana? Why assume a Cameroonian, two weeks into his United profession, understands the Maguire dynamic to such a excessive degree of element the difficulty proper on the entrance of his thoughts in his second sport isn’t organising his defence however making Dave from Bury like him?
The actual level about Onana is that he has the toughest job in soccer, a task so fraught the one cheap response is sympathy. Onana’s chief process, as ever, is to maintain the ball out of the online. However he’s additionally right here to do different issues. To reinvent Manchester United’s whole tactical plan, to liberate the forwards and midfield, to intervene with the opposition press, to regear his workforce’s away type. And to do all this just by being higher than David de Gea at passing the ball.
Onana will, after all, do that immediately, within the glare of one of the vital angsty, big-stage soccer golf equipment on the earth. He’ll do it whereas adapting to a brand new workforce, new nation, new colleagues, whereas additionally having good well being, good luck and no random occasions alongside the best way. Be good. Additionally, be transformative. Do it immediately. With out, and that is key, ever making any errors. Welcome, André, to the not possible job.
Little marvel this state of fundamental confusion was current in his tricksiest second thus far, Taiwo Awoniyi’s brilliant goal after 90 seconds at Previous Trafford in United’s final house sport. Onana began off in his designated sweeper place. This was abruptly deserted as he realised United’s defensive technique in that second was to see if they may give Awoniyi a lot area he merely drained himself out operating into it.
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In full retreat, Onana appeared to carry out 4 or 5 separate acts of goalkeeping throughout the identical motion: faking to dive, pre-diving, faux-diving, like a one-man virtuoso enjoying the spoons and the accordion whereas additionally juggling a set of steak knives. In some way he ended up levitating above the Previous Trafford turf in a seated place because the ball rolled beneath him, a second of anti-gravity, created, like so many issues on this drifting ghost membership, by the ability of pure, multifaceted confusion.
It’s Onana’s misfortune to face on the assembly level of two tides of confusion. Most clearly, the function of goalkeepers has modified so dramatically. The flexibility to embody the brand new tactical actuality is a serious a part of being signed and chosen. Therefore a bent to overstate the purpose, a subculture of prancing, wasp-waisted matadors, for whom each cross and drag-back and chop-turn looks like a determined bid for approval. So your model new game-changer would possibly simply shout and level slightly, with out intending it as an assault on the skinny line between civility and chaos.
The second aspect of pressure majeure is the very fact Manchester United itself is a drowned world, a meat grinder, a expertise furnace. Simply scroll down that record of pressed males, drifters, ghosts nonetheless trapped contained in the machine. Right here now we have an organisation so dysfunctional from the highest down that solely the rarest, luckiest, most diamond-hard of younger footballers goes to make it with out being bent out of form.
And ultimately now we have come full circle right here, as a result of that is additionally an applicable defence of Maguire, who turned up with an absurd price ticket, promoted slightly above his ceiling, however who can be a prisoner of United’s anti-energy; anticipated, as all new gamers are, absurdly, to repair this unfixable place.
Onana might or might not find yourself blooming in that soil. Regardless of having already been peeled, sliced and swept into the refuse bin by some notable TV pundits, he’s clearly a superb goalkeeper. He was United’s finest passer in the defeat at Arsenal. Both approach the true query, as ever, is what is that this place going to do to him?
