Such is Manchester United’s continuing fall that their FA Cup fifth-round penalty-shootout defeat to Fulham didn’t even feel particularly like there was any real magicking of the cup involved.
It felt, in truth, like exactly what it was: an upper mid-table Premier League side going to a lower mid-table Premier League side and just about managing to sneak through despite appearing to be the less invested of the pair due to the need to prioritise league commitments.
United couldn’t even muster the inexplicable and possibly fictitious but nevertheless extremely real-feeling edge that ‘big clubs’ usually manage to find during penalty shoot-outs. Although that edge is admittedly harder to find when your goalkeeper is telegraphing his intentions and almost diving before the penalty takers have even placed the ball on the very, very edge of the spot.
United didn’t even play that badly for the 120 (that was actually more like 130) minutes of a cup tie that was never quite as bad as an oddly miserabilist BBC half-time pundit analysis insisted in between Dr Who trailers.
Let’s not lose the run of ourselves: United were not by any conventional measure good in this game. But there were tantalising glimpses of at least a handful of players getting to grips with Ruben Amorim’s system.
There was a United-best performance in defence from Matthijs De Ligt, all crunching tackles and expert positioning coupled with the welcome flourish provided by a handful of dashing, raking passes to switch play from right to left.
Christian Eriksen is increasingly Too Old For This Sh*t but for nearly 70 minutes here his craft and experience knitted together a United performance of genuine competence before, football being football, his departure was followed by United finding an equaliser three minutes later.
This equaliser too, was a finely crafted thing. Substitute Alejandro Garnacho set Diogo Dalot away smartly down the left to pull the ball back for Bruno Fernandes to sweep home into a small target beyond Bernd Leno’s left hand and the far post.
Had United gone on to win it would be easy enough to argue they deserved it. Alas, as they went out there could be little argument the other way either.
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He may have been less than useless in the shootout, seemingly actively determined to make life as easy as possible for Fulham’s takers, but without Andre Onana’s saves United would not even have made it that far.
Yet his smartest saves came from longer-range efforts and for the most part United’s defence was possessed of a surety that has been so visibly and hilariously lacking. One brief moment of uncertainty between Harry Maguire and Onana apart, there were precious few indicators of anything approaching the kind of calamity that led to Liam Delap’s goal in the week.
This, though, is still the 2025 version of Manchester United, and that is one that simply cannot be relied upon for any great length of time. It really is only of limited value to be talking about the general uptick in overall defensive aptitude, awareness and application across over two hours of football when the goal conceded was yet another set-piece.
It had all the hallmarks. A corner that United felt was a goal-kick, right at the end of a cagey, even first half, and a disorganised zonal set-up in which United lost not one but two aerial duels as Calvin Bassey stole in to head home smartly. He has now scored 40 per cent of his career goals against Manchester United, fact fans.
The penalty shoot-out contained excellent penalties right up until it didn’t. Victor Lindelof and Joshua Zirkzee’s efforts were easily repelled by Bernd Leno, with Onana never getting a sniff of any of the four Fulham needed to secure victory.
A special shout for Sander Berge doing an even better version of the Harry Kane/Alan Shearer penalty than Alexander Isak earlier in the day. It might actually have been better than any of Kane’s or Shearer’s.
Fulham’s reward for this win in a tournament absolutely full of tantalising potential for the remaining teams was a home tie with Crystal Palace. It should, really, be a harder task than this, but United have until now always managed to retain a big-club aura in the unflinching world of knockout football.
It is in league football where their obvious flaws are more readily exposed. Had they prevailed here there would still have been a case based on their big-game wherewithal if nothing else to make them second favourites. They did win this last year, after all. And get to the final the previous year. This is only their second failure in 15 FA Cup ties.
It is impossible to make a coherent case that the stronger football team went out today, but the likelier cup winners probably did. It is therefore a result that will have gone down well with all other remaining clubs.
The big push now will come from trying to sell a quarter-final draw that somehow managed to be even duller than we expected (in truth, we really needed Palace-Brighton and Villa-City for it to have any kind of life) as a grand opportunity for an unlikely winner rather than a bunfight to see who gets to lose underwhelmingly and so, so anti-climactically to Man City in the final.
