Brentford 4-0 Manchester United (13 August 2022)
The darkest hour is before the dawn, they say, and Erik ten Hag’s United regime began with two grim league defeats. After Brighton had won at Old Trafford, brilliant Brentford made hay in boiling temperatures as the new United, in attempting to play the ball out from the back, looked rather like the failing collective of the previous decade. David de Gea dropped clangers, Cristiano Ronaldo snarled at his teammates. “[Ten Hag] will need to be an exceptional manager, a man of considerable moral courage, to recover from this,” I wrote in my match report that day. He has gone a considerable distance to suggest he might be. Brentford, meanwhile, confirmed they were here to stay as a fly in any passing elite-level ointment.
