A (partial) new owner, new signings, a new mood, but for Manchester United it was a very familiar story. João Pedro got the winner in the fifth minute of added time and, while United will lament a farcical second-half offside that prevented them taking the lead, Brighton had looked the likelier to score for all but about 10 minutes of the second half. For United this was another performance that was probably better than equivalent games last season, but still far from good enough.
The winner came after a sustained spell of pressure, Simon Adingra eventually dinking a ball to the back post where three Brighton players were lined up waiting to apply the coup de grace. For all that United might have drawn quiet encouragement from the way they pressed Brighton, from their sense of shape and structure, they suffer a want of conviction, a lack of ruthlessness. And, fundamentally, there is a bewildering incapacity to do the simple things well. Where were the markers? Why was half the six-yard box vacant in the 95th minute?
The first goal had been similar. As the ball was worked to João Pedro on the right with 32 minutes played, everybody stood off him. He had time to bend a dangerous ball across the six-yard box and, although nobody got a touch, the ball came to Kaoru Mitoma beyond the far post as he stole behind Noussair Mazraoui. As he drilled the ball low across goal, Harry Maguire couldn’t get to it – “I couldn’t see the ball,” he plaintively explained to Casemiro – and Danny Welbeck bundled it in.
Welbeck was the future of United once, a local lad and a fan with a knack of scoring goals. He left the club in 2014, two years before the emergence of Marcus Rashford, another local lad and a fan with a knack of scoring goals, who is also looking increasingly like a player whose potential will not be realised at Old Trafford. It was Rashford whose pass to Bruno Fernandes was intercepted by Billy Gilmour in the buildup to the Brighton opener.
Rashford had a miserable end to last season and his form hasn’t improved at the beginning of this. He missed those two chances against Manchester City in the Community Shield and he was at best an intermittent presence against Fulham last week. There is an obvious sense about of him of a player doubting himself and out of sorts with the world.
An attempt to take a free-kick quickly just before half-time that pointlessly gave the ball away was typical; his sense of urgency has curdled into a tendency to rush things, to snatch at chances. Again and again he made runs slightly too early and so moved offside. He looks frustrated. Perhaps he just needs a goal to get him going again, but the sense at the moment is that he needs a break, if not a move.
As so often, it was Mason Mount who was sacrificed as Erik ten Hag changed shape at half-time, bringing on Joshua Zirkzee, surely the player of greatest circumference seen in the Premier League since Tom Huddlestone (who, curiously, left United’s coaching staff in the summer to take up a role with England Under-21s; maybe Carrington, in a very literal sense, wasn’t big enough for the both of them). He might perhaps have benefited from being a little less big when, unable to stop his slide like an aquaplaning juggernaut, he inadvertently kneed Alejandro Garnacho’s goalbound shot over the line, causing it to be ruled out for offside.
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Zirkzee got the winner against Fulham and he made a noticeable difference here, at least to United’s attacking thrust. Defensively they still looked porous. James Milner had a shot cleared off the line and Welbeck had headed against the bar in the second half when Mazraoui slipped in Amad Diallo. He turned inside Jack Hinshelwood – at some point defenders are going to work out the Ivorian only ever shoots with his left foot – and his finish was deflected past Jason Steele by Jan Paul van Hecke.
The minutes that followed were end to end, but by added time, the home side were sufficiently in control that it felt a winner was coming. Brighton look like being hugely entertaining this season; United, for very different reasons, might still fear they will be.