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Old Trafford is scarcely short of traditions, but they have a new one. For the third game of the season, at home to Liverpool and when United have already been beaten by Brighton, they unveil an expensive defensive midfielder, parading him on the pitch before kick-off. For 2022, read 2024. For Casemiro, read Manuel Ugarte.
But only because the solution has become the problem. If United recognised the need to replace Casemiro less than two years after his debut and with two more years remaining on one of football’s worst contracts, the Brazilian couldn’t even occupy the role until the Ugarte era can begin in earnest, until he is eligible. If history is destined to repeat itself, Casemiro’s afternoon contained tragedy and farce. It was sufficiently harrowing, so humiliating to suggest this is the end: except no one else – not even a Saudi Arabian club – will want his salary on their books so United are trapped with a £63m deadweight.
If retirement doesn’t beckon, it is because of a contract. Casemiro’s former Real Madrid sidekick, Luka Modric, is six years his senior and still going but Casemiro feels an old 32. Now he puts the ‘old’ into Old Trafford.
He is not alone in that. There were ex-Manchester United footballers everywhere: Roy Keane in the television studio, Ruud van Nistelrooy in the dugout, Jaap Stam in the press box, Bryan Robson, Denis Irwin and Gary Pallister, dressed in white tracksuits – to their evident amusement – on the club’s request. There was an ex-footballer on the pitch, too: in the centre of United’s midfield. If, that is, they had a midfield.
Leave football before football leaves you, as Jamie Carragher put it. The game can have a cruelty, consigning its greats to the past with brutal illustrations they have become yesterday’s man. The football left Casemiro at Old Trafford: for each of Liverpool’s first two goals where, in different ways, he contrived to lose possession. He decided the English Clasico; just not in the way he was supposed to.
His week’s work has brought him more than £300,000 and only lasted 45 minutes; which, for those who can cope with the embarrassment, is a profitable business. His cameo – if a start can be described as such – was rammed with ignominies. There was Liverpool’s opening goal, fashioned when Casemiro presented the ball to Ryan Gravenberch but providing another action replay of sorts. United left players unmarked at the far post again. At least this time it was only two – the scorer Luis Diaz and Dominik Szoboszlai – after Brighton’s three when Joao Pedro scored. The only man marking Diaz when he headed in was his teammate.
There was Diaz’s second goal, when Casemiro was robbed by the Colombian, looking aged and cumbersome as he stumbled to the turf. To compound it, Diaz swept home his second goal after the kind of run a defensive midfielder ought to track.
There was the moment when Casemiro passed the ball straight out of play from Noussair Mazraoui’s throw: even a simple ball back to the taker proved beyond him. His powers have waned at Old Trafford; sadly, suddenly, shockingly. With his successor sat in the stands, these could be called ill-timed errors or evidence to the watching Ugarte of the scale of his task. There was a hole at the heart of their midfield, a vacancy for the tackler supreme.
Finally, there came the verdict from Erik ten Hag: the half-time axe. Enter Toby Collyer, who had never played a minute of league football. It was a substitution that suggested anyone would be better than Casemiro. Collyer ran around enthusiastically, if largely cluelessly: he was the older of a double act with Kobbie Mainoo, who again underlines that it breaches the Trade Descriptions Act to call him a defensive midfielder.
But Casemiro was supposed to be the best of his generation, even if it now looks the last generation. One of his last Real Madrid games was against Liverpool; it brought him his fourth Champions League. Yet the last year has brought untold examples of decline. There was the horror show against Crystal Palace, the weird, one-man interpretation of the offside trap against Arsenal, the way he was dropped for Sofyan Amrabat for the FA Cup final. There is a sorrow to it; United may have been a sinecure at the end of a glorious Real career but it was not supposed to go this way.
But it was proof that time waits for no man. Although if it did wait for Casemiro, it may be a lengthy wait. It could take him quite some time to catch up. The statue of United’s ‘holy trinity’ moves faster than the Brazilian.
Yet as United are already replacing a flagship signing from 2022, it illustrated how quickly their plans can go horribly wrong. And as Ugarte will be presumably be parachuted in, designed to be the catalyst Casemiro initially was, United have to hope the familiarity of the scenario means they are not trapped in a cycle of failure.
