David De Gea’s error in Manchester United’s 1-0 loss to West Ham loosened his team’s grip on the final Champions League qualification place on Sunday.
The Spain goalkeeper let Said Benrahma’s hopeful shot from 20 meters slip over his glove and into the net to condemn Erik Ten Hag’s team to back-to-back defeats in the Premier League, after a 1-0 loss at Brighton on Thursday.
“Mistakes are part of football and in this team you have to deal with it and bounce back because it is a team sport,” Ten Hag said. “Over the season, he is the one with the most clean sheets and also we did it as a team. It can happen, it’s football but everybody has to take responsibility.”
United now lies just one point ahead of a rapidly advancing Liverpool, albeit with a game in hand, but an eighth loss on the road this season could prove as costly for the visitors as it was priceless for West Ham.
The Hammers climbed seven points above the relegation zone and are surely now safe ahead of two matches against AZ Alkmaar in the semifinals of the Europa Conference League.
“As players, you can’t help to look around you,” West Ham midfielder Declan Rice said. “To win this one was big to give ourselves a gap between ourselves and the bottom.”
De Gea’s match began inauspiciously when his poor clearance flew to the feet of Rice, whose run into the area was only curtailed by a last-ditch tackle from Wout Weghorst.
Ten Hag is faced with a tough situation because while you’d want him to make adjustments similarly to Jurgen Klopp, unless the team looks to the academy, they don’t have available players to put into the lineup at least until Alejandro Garnacho is back from his injury. Raphael Varane and Lisandro Martinez still being out has forced ten Hag to play players he typically wouldn’t, and it’s starting to hurt the results.
It’s a time that coaching is critical because it’s one thing to change the performance by changing the players but it’s another to get different performances out of the same group.
United will need to do the latter or an inaugural season that looked so promising for ten Hag could end in sadness. Making Champions League is important on multiple levels as not only do United have to worry about the achievement that Champions League brings the squad but also the expectation to always be there.
This is a team that needs to offload players during the summer and look to bring in new ones, especially in midfield. But without making the top four, the caliber of player that United can attract during the summer can be hurt.
Linked to players like Harry Kane, United would need to look elsewhere as only offering them Europa League isn’t enough of an incentive to move to Old Trafford.
Things can be remedied with a few wins but they’re ones that the Red Devils will need sooner than later. If this keeps dragging on, it may only create a snowball effect that possibly makes it easier for Liverpool to pass them in the table after nobody thought it was likely.
