Fucking Good Football?
Fucking Good Football?
This week Manchester United beat Bournemouth 3-0, seemingly without breaking much of a sweat.
The week before, United beat Wolves and Nottingham Forest, keeping a clean sheet in both games.
We saw Casemiro boss the midfield, together with his offensive adjutant Eriksen. We saw Luke Shaw come into his own like never before. And, perhaps most excitingly, we saw Marcus Rashford score goals like it was 2015.
Is this the ‘fucking good football’ we heard Ten Hag speculate about earlier in the season?
Hearing this idiosyncratic phrase always takes me back to 2019, when Ajax reached the semi-final of the Champions League, beating teams like Real Madrid and Juventus along the way.
I lived on my own in a flat in the Bijlmer area of Amsterdam at the time, right next to the Johan Cruyff Arena. You could literally see it, in all its glory, through the window in my living room.
I didn’t get to watch Ajax in the stadium that season, so that’s where I watched all Ajax games.
Whenever Ajax scored, you could hear the crowd go bonkers. But the TV broadcast was slightly behind, so you had to wait a few seconds before you could be sure it was really a goal.
After confirming it with my own eyes, I would run to the window and scream and shake my fist at the Arena. I was at home on my own, but it felt like I was together with the 55.000 people in the stadium.
As Ajax fans, we had reason to be happy, because apart from 1995, this was the best football we had ever seen in our lives. It was, as Ten Hag would say, fucking good.
Will we see Ten Hag’s do something similar? Will we see his United curb-stomp European and/or Premier League teams with the same ease and frivolity? Perhaps.
But while things are starting to click for United, in a way it never did under previous managers in the years since Sir Alex retired, we’re not there yet.
When we are, I’ll be the first to run at my window and fist pump in the general direction of England across the North Sea.
We’d be seeing fucking good football together, and it would make all of those years waiting for it worth it.