Tag: Manchester United

It was about as close as an FA Cup-winning manager has come to a mic drop.

In a room of journalists who had spent the previous few days reporting on his bosses’ plan to replace him, a bruised, embattled but belligerent Erik ten Hag defended his record as manager of Manchester United.

“Two trophies in two years is not bad,” he said. “Three finals in two years is not bad. If they don’t want me, then I go somewhere else to win trophies because that is what I do.”

It was a good line, worth repeating, which he did. After Ten Hag’s contract was extended and his future settled, he sat down with MUTV in July and reiterated his “two trophies” point.

Then he said it again a few days later in Trondheim after United’s first pre-season friendly, adding: “Apart from (Manchester) City, that’s more than any other club in English football.”

He repeated it again after the friendly against Rangers in Edinburgh.

Then again on the tour of the United States.

That was just pre-season. Since the start of the campaign proper, Ten Hag has referenced his two domestic cup wins in six exchanges with journalists during pre- and post-match press conferences, to say nothing of interviews with broadcasters.

The latest instance, after Sunday’s 3-0 defeat to Liverpool, came amid a tense exchange with one journalist who Ten Hag invited to name the “mistakes” his team were accused of making. After the journalist rattled off a long list of repeated errors, Ten Hag retreated to his old faithful.

“I have a different vision. I think we won, after City, the most trophies in English football,” he said. “I am sorry for you.”

He’s right, of course. It is as true now as it was at Wembley. But three games into a new season, an argument with which he neatly skewered his critics in May is fast becoming a crutch to fall back on.

On Friday, having just repeated his favourite point, Ten Hag added: “There’s only one thing in football and that’s at the end of the season if you win prizes, trophies, or not.” But as others have noted, that view is in stark contrast to that of his predecessor Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.

“Any cup competition can give you a trophy but sometimes it’s more of an ego thing from other managers and clubs to finally win something,” Solskjaer said in March 2021.

“It’s not like a trophy will say, ‘We’re back’. It’s the gradual progression of being in and around the top of the league and the consistency and the odd trophies. Sometimes a cup competition can hide the fact you’re still struggling a little bit.”

Solskjaer’s words are those of a manager who had the opposite problem to Ten Hag. Under the Norwegian, United’s league finishes steadily improved — from sixth to third to second — but the trophy cabinet was bare.

Solskjaer was defending his record by claiming that the league is a true barometer of progress, just as Ten Hag is defending his record by pointing to silverware. As to which view is correct, opinions will vary.

As critical as it was for Solskjaer’s United to qualify for the Champions League on the final weekend of the 2019-20 campaign, do you remember who they beat that day? Do you remember the score? Maybe you do, but that 2-0 win behind closed doors at Leicester City is hardly a result that will echo through the ages.

Similarly, memories are not made by being runners-up in the league. Solskjaer’s side finished 12 points adrift of champions Manchester City the year they finished second, in 2021, having not topped the table from late January.

The only trophy United came close to winning that year was the Europa League. Speaking before the final in Gdansk, Solskjaer maintained that silverware sometimes “hides other facts”. But after United lost to Villarreal in a penalty shootout, he admitted he could not consider the season a success having failed to deliver silverware.

Ask some who have known the inner workings of Old Trafford over the years and they would say you cannot survive as United manager without winning trophies. Solskjaer’s spell in charge is arguably evidence of that, while Ten Hag’s proves the inverse: deliver a trophy plus the greatest day of United’s post-Sir Alex Ferguson era and you can survive anything, even the worst-ever Premier League finish.

There was also the 4-3 quarter-final win over Liverpool, of course — one of Old Trafford’s best games and atmospheres this century. Add the Carabao Cup victory on top, and the past two years have given supporters indelible memories, highs to balance out the lows.

But Solskjaer’s view is much closer to how performance is coldly assessed at the elite level in modern football. A league campaign over 38 games home and away is undeniably a truer gauge of a side’s quality, as well as typically the gateway to lucrative Champions League qualification, which affects budgets in a way the FA Cup cannot.

United may be the second-most successful side in English football over the past two years, as Ten Hag points out, but nobody would sincerely argue that they have been the second-best team.

Nor would anybody suggest United are closer to challenging City for major honours than Arsenal, despite Mikel Arteta only adding a Community Shield to his honours list since Ten Hag’s appointment.

That is the reality. In a quieter moment, outside the adversarial nature and pitched battles of a press conference, even Ten Hag would agree that trophies are not enough. You need both pots and points.

United’s decade-plus of underachievement will only have ended when the club are regularly competing for Premier League titles and reaching the latter stages of the Champions League again.

There were mitigating factors last season — injuries, off-field turmoil, takeover uncertainty, the absence of an established left-back — but United were below standard in the competitions that matter most.

That, despite domestic cup success, is why their manager is under pressure to prove progress has and can still be made, and why he will only be able to point to his two trophies for so long. When not staring down a room of journalists and television cameras, even Ten Hag would accept that.

GO DEEPER

Analysing Ashworth and Berrada’s Man Utd transfer briefing – ‘Erik has our full backing’

(Top photo: Erik ten Hag with the FA Cup; by Alex Pantling via Getty Images )

Andre Onana returned to competitive football this weekend in the Community Shield against Manchester City, with his side losing on penalties at Wembley.

Last season it emerged the Manchester United goalkeeper uses Vaseline on his gloves, which raised several other questions for me. What other substances do we ’keepers put on our gloves to try to gain an advantage? Is there anything in doing so that violates the laws of the game?

I knew I needed help from someone with better knowledge of the laws of the game than me. Thankfully, over my playing career I was fortunate to build up enough goodwill with a few professional referees that I was able to enlist one of them — Fredrik Klitte, who has been a ref for close to 25 years in Sweden, including the last decade at the top level.

“It’s legal for a goalkeeper to use Vaseline from a referee’s point of view, as long as the rule book doesn’t say otherwise, which it doesn’t today,” Klitte said.

When I asked him if he had ever encountered a goalkeeper trying to use any substances on their gloves before, his answer was a firm “no.” He did admit, however, that it could have happened without him knowing. “The referee isn’t required to check a goalkeeper’s gloves in the same way they are supposed to check a player’s studs or shin guards before a match, so it’s possible,” he said.

Klitte went on to explain there is a line in the rule book that states the referee does have the option to show a yellow card for unsportsmanlike behaviour if they discover a goalkeeper has handball players’ resin (which affords greater grip) on their gloves, for example. But that is rarely, if ever, enforced. “Then you can interpret it as a goalkeeper using incorrect equipment that must then be corrected,” he said. “However, you probably still don’t have support for that, due to the way the rule is currently written.”

Before I let him go, I asked Klitte one more time just to confirm, “So, technically speaking, a goalkeeper could use whatever they wanted on their gloves to try to improve their grip?”.

“Yes,” he said confidently. “There is nothing in the laws today that say otherwise.”

Vaseline sighted at a Premier League game (Michael Regan/Getty Images)

So with that established, it was time to experiment.

I wanted to test things that would be practical and we could realistically see a goalkeeper use. That means substances that wouldn’t totally destroy the gloves after one use. Therefore, even though I could fathom that handball resin, pine tar, or Stickum (a substance that was used for years in the NFL to assist players in hanging onto or catching the ball before being banned in 1981) would improve a goalkeeper’s grip, at least temporarily, they would almost certainly destroy the pair of gloves involved in the process and not be worth testing.

While I was able to find several different recommendations from fellow goalkeepers who swear by little tricks of the trade to improve their grip, including honey, maple syrup, sugary sports drinks and even homemade pastes, three products were mentioned more often than any others: GloveGlu — a product specifically created for goalkeeper gloves to help improve grip — shaving cream and hair spray. These were the three I knew I needed to try.

The next day, before training with the club where I’m goalkeepers coach, Angelholms FF in the Swedish third division, I ran a few errands around town and picked up a bottle of GloveGlu from the sporting-goods store and a bottle of shaving cream and hair spray from the supermarket. In theory, I could understand why each of these products would work and was excited to try them out for myself to see if there might be something out there better suited for a goalkeeper’s gloves than Vaseline.

When our ’keepers Robin Streifert and Lukas Bornandersson arrived at the training facility, I informed them we had an assignment in training that day: to test a few products and see if any of them would improve our grip on the ball, however, I waited to inform them exactly what it was that we would be testing. The only information I gave them was to bring an extra pair of gloves out to the pitch with them.

There was a consensus the GloveGlu would work, since it was made specifically for goalkeeper gloves, but they were highly doubtful about the shaving cream and hair spray.

Since Robin already had a lot of experience with using Vaseline on his gloves, consistently employing it in both training and matches, I thought he would be the perfect candidate to compare it with the effects of GloveGlu. Lukas on the other hand was still relatively new to the Vaseline idea and was a bit sceptical. Therefore, I wanted him to test it for the first time and see if his experience was anything like Robin’s.

I, on the other hand, would first try out the shaving cream and the hair spray. Then, if I thought it either worth introducing to the training session with Robin and Lukas, we would do so.

When the goalkeepers were done with their warm-up, Robin came up to me and grabbed the GloveGlu, Lukas took the Vaseline and they started to apply them to their gloves.

Robin’s gloves had some age to them, and it had been a while since they had been used, but the GloveGlu suddenly gave them some new life. As Robin clapped his palms together and felt the stickiness of the spray start to have an effect, he nodded his head. “This stuff might actually work,” he said.

The grip initially proved to be good, certainly much better than it would have been without GloveGlu. It took a pair of old gloves that he would never have trusted for a game and made them usable again. However, despite the positive first impressions, the stickiness didn’t last very long.

GloveGlu was effective, but wore off quickly (Matt Pyzdrowski/The Athletic)

It was after just a few rounds of our shooting session when Robin noticed the gloves started to feel silky smooth. Balls that initially were lodging snugly into his gloves, started to become more difficult to catch and often bounced back out and into play. At that point, all he had to do was go and reapply the GloveGlu for it to become effective again, but I could sense his frustration each time he had to do that throughout the training.

Though Robin’s first impressions of GloveGlu were positive, Lukas, on the other hand, was doubtful about the impact Vaseline was going to have almost immediately.

As he bounced the ball up and down and caught it over and over, he shook his head. “It feels like there isn’t an ounce of grip!”, he shouted. “I don’t know how you guys think this is any good!”.

Both Robin and I looked at each other and laughed. It was like we already knew what was going to happen.

After all, when French club Bordeaux’s Swedish goalkeeper Karl-Johan Johnsson introduced the stuff to Robin almost a year ago, he went through the same progression himself. First there is scepticism and doubt, then, intrigue and wonder start to take hold, and by the end of training, nearly every goalkeeper who has ever tried the stuff ends up loving it.

Unsurprisingly, this is exactly what happened with Lukas.

When the ball started smacking safely into his gloves over and over again, it brought a big smile to his face. When he went over to the tub of Vaseline after about 20 to 25 minutes of training and grabbed another glob for the palms of his gloves, Robin and I knew he was hooked.

“OK, OK, you guys were right, this really does work well!”, Lukas said with enthusiasm in his voice.

Toward the end of training, I decided it was time to give the other two products a try.

When I read about shaving cream and hair spray online, those who used them believed they were most effective a few minutes after application. So as Robin and Lukas had a water break and we took a little pause in our session, I took out two sets of gloves and applied shaving cream to one pair, hair spray to the other, and then let them rest, palms up, next to the goal.

While there wasn’t that much I needed to do with the pair that had hair spray on, other than let them dry and rest, I did read that the pair with shaving cream on needed a little more attention. Rather than rubbing the shaving cream into the palm directly, like you would do with Vaseline, I had read it was best to squirt a generous amount onto the palm and then wait to rub it into the latex just before use.

Matt’s gloves after the initial application of shaving cream (Matt Pyzdrowski/The Athletic)

When I went over to the gloves during our next pause in training to check on their progress, it didn’t take long for me to realise that the hair spray wasn’t going to have any effect whatsoever. Though it did appear to create a sticky substance on the palms of the gloves, after just one catch of the ball the effect had entirely worn off and actually left a residue on the palms of my glove which became incredibly slippery.

Though I still decided to give hair spray a shot and had Robin and Lukas pepper me with a few shots, it was clear that catching the ball was going to be an incredibly difficult task. There was no need to explore hair spray any further. It wasn’t going to work.

After taking off my hair-sprayed gloves, I picked up my other pair that had shaving cream on them, put them on, and began to rub the shaving cream into the palms of my gloves until it was absorbed into the latex.

Matt’s gloves after rubbing the shaving cream into the palms a few minutes later (Matt Pyzdrowski/The Athletic)

When I started rubbing my palms together and felt the stickiness take hold, I suspected it was going to work as intended. The palms of the gloves remained moist but also felt a bit sticky after the shaving cream had dried, and after a few bounces of the ball on the grass, my confidence in it grew. I asked Robin and Lukas to come over so I could throw some shaving cream onto their gloves.

Robin, whose gloves were a little older and more broken down than Lukas’ pair, didn’t feel like there was much of an impact. However, when Lukas jumped in goal and started gripping shot after shot, his grin went from ear to ear.

“I don’t know what it is, if it’s mental or if I’m just having a good day, but it really does feel like it works!”, he shouted.

It may sound strange at first that shaving cream could improve the grip of your goalkeeper gloves, but when you understand how latex works, it makes sense.

Without getting too technical, latex is a foam. It is made up of thousands of tiny holes, much like a kitchen sponge. When the materials that make those tiny holes are dry, the latex becomes hard and brittle. When they are wet, the holes expand and the material becomes softer — again, like a sponge. So by adding shaving cream, you are ultimately helping keep the latex moist and sticky and allowing it to do what it was made to do in this case: grip the football.

After facing a few more shots, Robin, Lukas and I sat down next to the goal to discuss our findings.

We quickly agreed that although there was a positive effect to using shaving cream, it wasn’t as effective as Vaseline or GloveGlu and it was hard for us to imagine it would have the same effect as Vaseline in wet weather (Vaseline is designed to moisturize the latex, but also act as a repellent to prevent dirt and grime from covering the palms of your gloves when it rains).

Plus, in a game situation, when your time is so limited, you would never have enough of a break in play to go to the side of the goal and apply it effectively, whereas GloveGlu and Vaseline were much easier to apply quickly and see immediate results.

Robin, right, and Lukas discussing their experiments (Cherie Mårtensson/Ängelholms FF)

It’s been almost a year since Robin first started using Vaseline, and though it’s still an important part of his routine, his use of it has slightly changed. He found out first-hand that the negative side of using Vaseline every day is that it can damage the latex on your gloves and reduce their durability. Though Vaseline is initially moist when you apply it, when it dries out, your gloves are in danger because the Vaseline starts to be absorbed into the pores of the latex, dries it out, and can crack the gloves.

“At the beginning, I was putting Vaseline on my gloves every day, but it didn’t take long for me to realise that it wasn’t sustainable in the long run because I was going through a new pair of gloves every other week,” he said.

He would go on to explain, however, that despite Vaseline being tough on the durability of his gloves, throwing some of it on an old pair of gloves did seem to bring some life back to them. Which was something Lukas could also confirm after his own experience with the stuff.

“I have an old pair that I use now and again in training when it rains and I’m worried my grip will be impacted because of it,” he said. “I throw a dab of Vaseline on them and suddenly they have good grip again. I noticed that today as well. I was unsure what would happen since I was using an old pair of gloves I hadn’t used in a few months, but I was blown away by the results. I haven’t had that good of a grip in my gloves in a long time.”

Despite the negative impact Vaseline can have on the durability of his gloves, Robin did say he still prefers it to GloveGlu because he feels the effect from it lasts longer and gives a more “stable” feeling. However, he did admit GloveGlu works better in dry weather (which is something that can be a problem with Vaseline) and doesn’t damage the latex as much.

Some goalkeepers still stick to using their own saliva (ANP via Getty Images)

Every athlete is always looking for new and innovative ways to uncover marginal gains, and professional goalkeepers adding Vaseline to their gloves is just the latest example of that.

Though the security and trust Vaseline can provide is an incredibly important feeling for every goalkeeper, all of us agreed that it shouldn’t be used with the expectation that it’s suddenly going to fix all your problems on the pitch. It doesn’t matter how much of it you smear on your gloves, it can’t hide poor technique. That’s why it is important to perfect your technique first, then use Vaseline, GloveGlu, or another similar product as an added tool down the line if you feel it’s needed.

Most professional goalkeepers have a glove sponsorship and brands will send them new pairs pretty much whenever they ask for them. So clearly, they aren’t worried about their gloves’ durability or about what happens to them after using Vaseline.

That’s the biggest reason that we all agreed younger goalkeepers and amateurs might be wise to hold off on using Vaseline on that brand-new pair of gloves and instead save it for a rainy day or when they get a bit old and worn and need a new lease on life.

(Top photo: Charlotte Wilson/Offside via Getty Images)

Last season, it was a Brazilian midfielder at Liverpool. This season, it’s been his international team-mate at Manchester United.

“I think Casemiro’s legs have gone,” Jamie Carragher told the Covering Liverpool podcast in October. “I noticed it last season at Anfield and I didn’t like what I saw. It took me back to watching Fabinho last year for Liverpool. I want to be the first to say it (about Casemiro). I don’t want to say it when everyone else is saying his legs have gone.”

Regardless of who said what and when, Carragher — who played for Liverpool until he retired at age 35 — is not a lone voice in this debate, and Fabinho and Casemiro are far from the only players singled out for seemingly having lead in their boots.

Any footballer over the age of 30 who is struggling for form leaves themselves open to that type of criticism, but in particular if they are now coming off second best in the sort of duels they used to win and playing in a way that makes it look like the game is now a split-second too quick for them.

Casemiro, who turns 32 on Friday, was at risk of straying into that territory against Luton Town yesterday. “A serial offender who kept fouling time and time again”, was the way former England midfielder Jamie Redknapp, a pundit on UK broadcaster Sky Sports’ coverage of the match, summarised his display.

Withdrawn at half-time, and fortunate in the eyes of many to have avoided a second yellow card, Casemiro is collecting bookings at quite a rate, even by his standards. He has now been cautioned in eight of his last 11 matches for club and country, and four out of five since returning from almost three months out with a hamstring injury in January.

What is clear is that the spotlight can be unforgiving for older players and, at times, unfair.

Gareth McAuley, who was still playing centre-back in the Premier League at the age of 37, viewed the “legs have gone” comment as an “easy shot” when it was directed at him at West Bromwich Albion, especially given how hard he was working to keep in shape and that it was not backed up by the data he was privy to at his club.

“I was thinking, ‘I’m doing more than people who are 10 years younger’,” the 80-cap Northern Ireland international McAuley tells The Athletic. “You think, ‘Do you know what? Show some respect’. But it’s getting even younger now: boys at 28 and 29 are being described as ‘done’.”

Not every player has reason to feel hard done by in this situation — in some cases, they are in denial.

One former international midfielder, not long retired from playing, was viewed by his coach as ‘undroppable’ because of his status. But others at the club felt the player had become a liability as he could no longer track runners and move fast enough.

Some are honest enough to hold their hands up and accept that time has caught up with them – a reality that can creep up on players during a season or, in the case of Gary Neville, be revealed in one brutal moment.

At West Brom on New Year’s Day in 2011, a 35-year-old Neville made his first start for Manchester United in two months. He describes in his autobiography how he made West Brom winger Jerome Thomas look like Cristiano Ronaldo during a deeply uncomfortable 71-minute performance in which he was lucky to avoid a red card.

Neville recalled how Mike Phelan, United’s assistant manager at the time, wandered across for a word when the ball rolled out of play close to the dugouts.

“You’re f***ed, aren’t you?” Phelan said.

Neville nodded.

Thomas, who made more than 150 appearances in the Premier League with four different clubs, remembers that game well, and also the comments Neville made later.

“I guess that was how Gary rationalised it because he was on his way out and he didn’t feel he was at his best,” Thomas says. “I don’t want this to come across the wrong way, because Gary Neville is a legend, but what he doesn’t realise is he wasn’t the only person I was doing that to. As a left-winger, I would go into every game with the goal to either get the right-back sent off or subbed.”

Jerome Thomas made Gary Neville realise his career was over (Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)

Neville would have been dismissed on another day. Instead, he was subbed. The following morning, he told United manager Sir Alex Ferguson that he was retiring. He never played for them again.

Sol Campbell, Neville’s former England team-mate, had a different experience before bringing the curtain down on his career.

“My legs never went. It was just you needed the right rest period,” Campbell, whose last match was as a 36-year-old for Newcastle United in the 2010-11 Premier League, tells The Athletic. “Once I went back to Arsenal (for a second spell midway through 2009-10), I was 35 and my numbers weren’t there, but getting back to good training helped me compete with the guys. It’s difficult, though, as you get older with the recovery. It’s hard on the body.

“If you play one game a week it’s great, but sometimes it’s four games in 10 days and that’s when you start to feel it. If you have a sympathetic manager who understands that you’re not 21 anymore, then it’s OK. So, for me, it’s not about ‘Legs gone’, it’s about recovery.”

His legs have gone.

“Sport, never mind football, is full of throwaway phrases like that,” says Chris Barnes, an experienced sports scientist who has worked for several professional clubs, starting with Middlesbrough in 1998.

“Wearing the sports scientist’s hat, one of the big challenges we have in football is getting away from focusing on averages and norms and looking at players as individuals. The reality is that phrase is appropriate (for some players) and in others, maybe not so.

“If you track a player’s journey from a physical perspective, it’s pretty widely accepted that they peak around about 26 to 28. What that means can be interpreted in a number of ways – peak is different for different players in terms of how fast they can run, their ability to do repeated high-intensity activities and so on.”

GO DEEPER

What age do players in different positions peak?

Although the data never lies, it is important to not get carried away with who runs the furthest, which is to take nothing away from the evergreen James Milner, who topped the charts at the age of 37 last season.

11.2km – Which players covered the most distance (in kilometres) per 90 minutes in the Premier League in 2022-23 (min. 900 minutes)?

11.2km – James Milner
11.2km – Brenden Aaronson
11.0km – Ryan Christie
11.0km – Christian Eriksen
11.0km – Roberto Firmino

Ageless. pic.twitter.com/FQDvKn9GPT

— OptaJoe (@OptaJoe) May 30, 2023

“Total distance is full of noise,” Barnes adds. “The Blackburn winger (Morten Gamst) Pedersen always had the highest total distance of any game, but you must look at what is effective work and what isn’t.

“(Centre-back) Robert Huth, who was at Middlesbrough, would always come and look at how little work he’d done, because he felt his best games were performed when he made good decisions and was positionally correct and therefore the amount of work he needed to do was less. So it’s not really a ‘More is better’ situation. Football isn’t a maximal sport. It’s what typifies, if you like, the DNA, the characteristics, of a player’s game.”

How players engage with their physical data is interesting. Some bury their head in the sand or — and this was witnessed first-hand with a Premier League centre-back during a fly-on-the-wall pre-season piece a few years back — even challenge the figures. Others go actively looking for their data, to use it as a yardstick to not just inform how hard they need to work in training, but also to ensure that the manager doesn’t have an excuse to leave them out.

“The high-speed running and things like that, you get your data and they (the sports scientists) know exactly what you need to be hitting,” McAuley explains. “But in certain sessions as a defender, you won’t get what you need. So I could say, ‘OK, I need another 200 metres of high-speed running’, so I would go and run box-to-box to get that and keep me on the sports-science knife-edge between injury and peak condition.

“I had (Craig) Dawson, 10 years younger than me, who was trying to take my place, so I had to make sure I was trying to be better, trying to stay quicker. In a way, that was driving me. Also, if you weren’t in the team and you’re knocking on the manager’s door, he can’t say that your data has dropped off in training and that your legs have gone.”

SkillCorner works with around 150 clubs around the world and is at the forefront of physical data. It released some fascinating graphs on Twitter in November: the first shows the top speed of players by age during last season. In the over-30s category, Manchester City’s Kyle Walker, 33, remained the fastest player, while both Jamie Vardy and Ashley Young, who are now 37 and 38 years old respectively, were way above the average for their age.

That said, it is also worth remembering Barnes’ comment about the importance of analysing players as individuals and against their own benchmarks rather than comparing them to others.

Every Premier League club will have access to this kind of data and, crucially, will be able to see how a player’s physical levels go up and down over time.

This next SkillCorner chart gives a glimpse of what that looks like — in this instance, it shows Dani Carvajal, the now 32-year-old Spain and Real Madrid right-back. Carvajal’s high-intensity activities per 90 minutes are represented game-by-game and there is also a season average, measuring what SkillCorner describes as “a player’s longitudinal physical performance”.

Of course, there are other factors to take into consideration, especially when analysing an extended period. Managerial, tactical and positional changes can all impact the physical data gathered in matches.

“In training, the sports scientists have a responsibility to be looking at appropriate data to give a mark on the condition of the players they’re working with, and that would involve things like recovery between bouts — heart-rate data is super-informative in things like that,” Barnes adds.

“These high-intensity actions and efforts are the key and unlock a better understanding as to whether the qualities and characteristics of a player have changed. But you definitely have to take into account the tactical context: how the game is evolving and how coaches want it to be played.

“It’s been widely documented how the physicality of Manchester City’s game has grown year on year with Pep Guardiola’s philosophy and Kyle Walker has been able to fit into that. If anything, it’s provided a platform for him to showcase the qualities he possesses even more.”

“You play football with your head and your legs are there to help you.” – Johan Cruyff

Peter Taylor was singing from that hymn sheet when he brought Roberto Mancini to Leicester City in 2001, Taylor, the club’s manager at the time, openly admitted he signed the 36-year-old Italian forward “for his football knowledge, not his legs”. Chelsea clearly felt the same way about Thiago Silva joining them at the age of 35.

Barnes talks about how “game intelligence continues to increase” and, at times, can compensate for the ageing process, but he also points to a 2015 study that he was involved in looking at “longitudinal match performance characteristics of UK and non-UK players in the English Premier League” and the hard evidence that football at the highest level had become “seriously more demanding from the point of view of the high-intensity requirements”.

“SkillCorner has carried on that work and brought it up to date and that has shown that the demands of competing in the game have grown again,” Barnes adds.

“Gary Neville, Kyle Walker and Dani Carvajal are interesting examples, because they’re all right full-backs, and I would argue that full-back and striker are where this evolution has been most dramatic in terms of requirements to play the game.”

Kyle Walker’s athleticism remains undimmed (Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)

For a No 6 in the modern era, the skill set and the physical demands are huge.

“In this position, you need a guy who wins challenges and protects everybody, but who plays football as well,” Jurgen Klopp, Liverpool’s manager, said last season. “Fab (Fabinho) did that for us for plenty of years (and was) absolutely brilliant. At the moment, it’s not clicking. We have to go through that.”

Outside the club, pundits were quick to judge what had gone wrong with Fabinho. “You know when you’re a midfielder and your legs just start to go and you can’t get around the pitch as much as you would like, that’s what it seems to be,” Micah Richards, the former Manchester City defender, told BBC Sport.

Defensively, Fabinho’s output did drop last season. According to Opta, he was recovering the ball less, winning fewer duels and not making as many interceptions, which helps explain why Liverpool were happy to cash in on him in the summer. With Casemiro, his data shows he is making fewer interceptions in the Premier League this season compared to last (down from 1.4 per game to 0.9) and winning possession on fewer occasions too (down from 8.7 per game to 6.0).

Of course, none of those statistics can be seen in isolation. Last season at Liverpool, for example, Fabinho was far from the only player struggling for form. There is also the question of the team setup and how much that leaves a player exposed. Casemiro, in now Sky pundit Gary Neville’s words, was “absolutely torn to shreds” against Wolves in the first match of this season — a comment that was an indictment of the shape of United’s midfield as much as anything.

In the absence of detailed physical data to prove otherwise, people will draw their own conclusions from what they see during matches (just as managers used to do before the sports-science revolution) and it doesn’t take much for a narrative to take hold, especially when a player is in their thirties.

The sight of 20-year-old Jamal Musiala skipping away from Casemiro three times in the space of seven minutes during United’s 4-3 defeat against Bayern Munich in the Champions League earlier in the season (albeit the Brazilian scored twice that night) provided one of those moments.

In reality, Casemiro was always going to be an easy target for the “legs have gone” narrative, mindful of the reaction when United agreed to pay Real Madrid £70million ($88.2m at current rates) for a 30-year-old in summer 2022. Even INEOS, United’s new investors, were surprised at the numbers involved in the deal.

As a counterpoint, it is important to remember that Casemiro performed really well for United in that debut season and with more time to get up to speed after his recent injury, and with the hugely impressive teenager Kobbie Mainoo operating in the same midfield, there is an argument he could still be an important player at Old Trafford.

Either way, it’s a matter of time before the same four words are levelled at someone else.

McAuley smiles. “I think that (phrase) is kind of deep-rooted in pre-sports-science football,” he adds.

“Do the legs go? Maybe. But what I would say is that it’s the desire to keep doing it — the mental side. You can tell yourself to do anything. And with the mind and the willpower to do it, you can.”

(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)