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EPL TALK: Manchester United must win the derby, for the league's sake

Manchester City striker Erling Haaland (left) will face Manchester United defender Lisandro Martinez in the weekend derby. (PHOTO: Reuters/Getty Images)
Manchester City striker Erling Haaland (left) will face Manchester United defender Lisandro Martinez in the weekend derby. (PHOTO: Reuters/Getty Images)

LOOKING ridiculously fit, tanned and healthy, Teddy Sheringham told an audience in Singapore what the audience already knew.

“If you’re asking me, Manchester City are going to win the league again,” he said on Yahoo News Singapore's "Footballing Weekly" show this week. “They are that dominant.”

Of course they are. Football is a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes, argue about a dodgy VAR decision and then Manchester City parade the English Premier League trophy around a half-empty town centre.

Pep Guardiola’s men are like 56-year-old Sheringham in his tight shorts. They do not get old. They do not change. They are eternally preserved in a winning bubble. At the Etihad, the immovable objects and the unstoppable forces are one and the same.

The serial winners are morphing into cartoonish antagonists, a gang of Ivan Dragos, injected with petrodollars and knocking down the little people foolish enough to face them.

On Sunday, this will literally be the case in the Manchester derby, with a physical metaphor so obvious, so Hollywood, that even Sylvester Stallone might reject it. Erling Haaland will come face-to-nipple with Lisandro Martinez. One is blonde and looks like a Viking long boat propped up against a goalpost, standing at 1.94m. The other is dark-haired, slight of frame and 1.75m tall in his boots.

If Haaland doesn’t say, “I must break you” and smash away Martinez’s handshake before saluting his Abu Dhabi paymasters in the VIP suite, then we’re all going to be disappointed.

To amplify the absurdity of Rocky IV, to really hammer home the David and Goliath mismatch between Drago and Balboa on screen, Stallone offered us a close-up of the dirty Russian being injected with steroids. For the Manchester derby, a close-up of the Norwegian tightening his ponytail will have a similar effect.

This fixture is not so much a simplistic battle between us and them, but an existential struggle between us and an oil-rich foreign country attempting to flex their soft power muscles, until November, when a rival oil-rich foreign country will attempt to flex their soft power muscles as World Cup hosts.

It’ll be a Netflix documentary one day but, suffice to say, Manchester United find themselves occupying the moral high ground. Admittedly, this is still a club owned by the Glazers. A Glazer-occupied moral high ground comes with more booby traps than the opening scene of an Indiana Jones movie, but here we are.

Manchester United are the underdogs, a team of plucky Rocky Balboas. They are punching up, not in the 1990s sense, when Roy Keane literally punched up and kicked down, especially if it was Haaland’s dad, but in the current “all we want for Xmas is a title race” sense.

David vs Goliath clash as Martinez tries to stop Haaland

Check the latest betting figures. Haaland is getting odds of six to one, not to score, but to score a hat-trick, in a Manchester derby. That’s just daft.

He has already plundered 11 league goals this season. He’s the James Bond of assassins, the very worst and yet the very best in the business. Everyone knows his name. Everyone knows where to find him. He hides in plain sight. He forgoes subtlety and invisibility for blunt force trauma. And still, he’s rarely caught and never misses.

Only Martinez stands in his way, like a traffic cone expected to halt a runaway tank. The Argentine has settled comfortably alongside Raphael Varane. What Martinez lacks in height, he overcompensates with his reading of the game. In the derby, he’ll need to read his lines like Sir Ian McKellan screaming, “You shall not pass, Norwegian.”

Erling Haaland (left) and Lisandro Martinez tussling for the ball during a Champions League clash while they were at Borussia Dortmund and Ajax respectively.
Erling Haaland (left) and Lisandro Martinez tussling for the ball during a Champions League clash while they were at Borussia Dortmund and Ajax respectively. (PHOTO: Rico Brouwer/Soccrates/Getty Images)

It’s a fanciful hope, but less fanciful than it was a month ago. Erik ten Hag has settled a transitional side. He has already left Liverpool’s “mentality monsters” looking like a Minnie Mouse tribute act. He’s deflated Arsenal’s title ambitions and seen off Southampton and Leicester City, with a largely unchanged group.

After the Brentford debacle, ten Hag accepted that poor Harry Maguire had morphed into a dangling piano in a comedy skit, forever waiting to clatter to the ground for the amusement of others. He gave Maguire a breather. Varane and Martinez clicked. Tyrell Malacia validated ten Hag’s tendency to go Dutch in the transfer market and Diogo Dalot has enjoyed the most unexpected career renaissance in Manchester since Liam Gallagher.

The Red Devils are flirting with real defensive solidity, which is tempting fate before the derby, but ten Hag’s 4-2-3-1 has embraced the concept of the right men doing the right jobs in the right positions. What’s wrong with this deep-thinking Dutchman? Has he learned nothing from the Old Trafford soap opera?

Ten Hag is replacing comic relief with consistency, to the extent that even Scott McTominay has given up one for the other. His form has ensured that Casemiro’s slow return to full fitness is no longer a pressing issue.

A month or so ago, the prospect of Marcus Rashford leading the attack over Cristiano Ronaldo, in a Manchester derby, seemed about as likely as leaving out a £70-million Champions League winner. Both Casemiro and Ronaldo are expected to be on the bench on Sunday.

And their team-mates are expected to carry the hopes of those longing for something other than further confirmation that foreign countries can still buy the league every year.

At the risk of alienating both fanbases, Manchester United are beginning to look a little like Liverpool, faced with the onerous task of holding back the blue tide of limitless wealth. A United victory could prop up the illusion of competition, for a while at least.

Manchester United are beginning to look a little like Liverpool, faced with the onerous task of holding back the blue tide of limitless wealth. A United victory could prop up the illusion of competition, for a while at least.

And that’s vital. Imagine the alternative. Imagine an easy City victory as Guardiola’s cavaliers take out all and sundry between now and the unwanted World Cup break.

Who fancies coming back at Christmas to see the same movie we saw last year, the anti-Scrooge one where the rich only get richer and keep the big silverware for themselves? That sounds fun.

So it’s all on Manchester United. The little guys. That’s right. For this derby at least, the Red Devils are the little guys, fighting for a campaign worth watching after Christmas.

This is the time to go a little Hollywood. It’s possible. Martinez has done it before. Last year, his Ajax faced Haaland’s Borussia Dortmund in the Champions League. Ajax won 4-0. Ten Hag was the Ajax manager.

They knew how to stop Haaland then. Do it again and we’ve got a proper title race on our hands.

Neil Humphreys is an award-winning football writer and a best-selling author, who has covered the English Premier League since 2000 and has written 26 books.

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