For all their expenditure, Manchester United are somehow still short of a wide forward, a left-back and a centre-back and are slipping back to where they were pre-lockdown
There was an anecdote the American philosopher William James liked to tell about a regular user of laughing gas. When he was under the influence, he believed, everything fell into place and he understood the secret of the universe, but as soon as he came round it was lost. So one night he left a notepad by his bed and, half‑waking from his dream, wrote down his vision before slipping out of consciousness again. When he fully came round, he reached eagerly for the pad. What had his great insight been? He looked at his words and read: “A smell of petroleum prevails throughout.”
There was a spell towards the end of last season when it briefly looked as though Ole Gunnar Solskjær had also cracked it, that the doors of his perception had been flung open and all the doubts had coalesced into a coherent tactical pattern. Here was the answer. But now, in the cold light of early autumn, as he prepares for Sunday’s meeting with Tottenham, he looks at the pad by the side of his bed and reads only the enigmatic words “Bruno Fernandes”.
