Manchester United have made their best start to a league season in an astonishing 110 years. Jose Mourinho’s side blew West Ham away last week with a 4-0 win at Old Trafford and recorded an equally emphatic victory over Swansea City on Saturday. Eric Bailly’s first goal for the club put United on their way to a straightforward victory before a late blitz with three goals in the final 10 minutes during a 120-second blitz put the gloss on an emphatic score line. Romelu Lukaku, Paul Pogba and Anthony Martial were all on the score sheet for the second weekend in a row, ensuring United scored four goals or more in the opening two games of a league campaign for the first time since the 1907/08 season.
‘It’s 4-0 again with a clean sheet, we want to carry on this road and if we want this we have to carry on like that,’ said Pogba after the match. `We are more confident we know each other more it’s the second year, you have to change the team when it’s the manager’s first year. ‘Yes, in the first year we won trophies but now we are confident and now we know each other it’s easier for us.’ The conventional wisdom when United signed Lukaku was that, far from his habit of scoring plenty of goals against weaker teams being a weakness, it was exactly what they needed.
Draws against the lesser lights last season was what held them back: in their two games this term, they have ruthlessly swept aside two of those teams with little fuss. Two games are not enough to spot a trend, to truly conclude that last season’s problems have been fixed, and it should of course be noted that West Ham were desperate last week and Swansea come into the season woefully underprepared, having sold Gylfi Sigurdsson.
But the signs are certainly promising. This is starting to look more and more like a Jose Mourinho team, rarely flash, often not especially easy on the eye, but always effective. They tend to find a way to win, and even as it looked as if a lull in the second half might prove costly, a burst of four incisive, quick goals in four minutes killed the game off.
We won’t be able to properly judge this United team for a few weeks, and really until they’ve faced stronger opposition, but their status among the preseason favourites for the title looks justified.
