Nobody really knows how good Anthony Martial is, or could have been or may yet be. Least of all, you suspect, Martial himself, whose last three years after that lavish £53m transfer from Monaco have been spent in stages of uncertainty, in a team who have meandered through assorted fraught and fragile new dawns.
For those ill-disposed to José Mourinho it has been tempting to lump Martial in already as a Salah-to-be, another case of De Bruyne-shock in-waiting, an attacking talent destined to bloom spectacularly away from Mourinho’s heavy air.
Perhaps Martial may still find the right forward gear under Mourinho. Certainly, there was evidence of his craft and poise here as he scored twice in the second half, helped on both occasions by Juan Mata, who played with furious energy for 30 minutes to wrench the afternoon back Manchester United’s way.
Ross Barkley’s late equaliser made it 2-2 and prevented a win that would have taken United – in crisis, remember – to within four points of the top of the table. But there was enough to cast some confusing shadows, to inspire for the second week in a row a sense of frustration at the range of attacking talents trapped within this team.
Perhaps United should only play second halves. Here they produced a brilliantly chaotic, angry, overwrought back-end to this game, with two goals and a scuffle on the benches having spent the first half looking like a team trapped within their own gloom‑ridden entropy.
What to make of this? Stirring signs of a rebirth and renewal? Or maddening evidence of what could have been in a parallel world of alternative Mourinho? The French have a concept called “l’esprit de l’escalier”. It refers to the sudden realisation of what you should have said, how you should have handled that, the things you only think of when you’re outside going down the stairs.
For Mourinho, the danger is these latest sparks turn into his own esprit de l’escalier postscript. Right now United look their best, most compelling self only when the game comes apart at the seams, when control and planning and systems die away.
There was a feeling of slight surprise at the majesty of Martial’s intervention in the second half, albeit United got there by plodding through another of those mannered first halves, a zombie-like team following zombified orders. And not new-style high-speed zombies that come crashing in through the window, but old-fashioned zombies, zombies of the 1970s lumbering along the shopping centre aisles, plugged in to their own shrinking range of motion.
Stamford Bridge had been in festive mood at kick-off on a lovely, soft Saturday lunchtime. The teams emerged through flaring tongues of fire, with a glaze of smoke across the pitch and an enormous banner draped right across the Matthew Harding end. The banner read: “Eden Hazard”, next to a large picture of, yes, Eden Hazard. OK, so it’s not much of a philosophy. But it is hard to quibble with it as a basic statement of facts.
At which point the same things that happened before happened again. Mourinho picked a team who looked brimful of attacking adventure but in practice involved attacking players tethered to an uncomfortably defensive shape. Marcus Rashford, Martial, Paul Pogba and Mata all started. But Martial and Rashford began as auxiliary full-backs and Pogba sat in beside the motionless man-shaped structure known as Nemanja Matic. Mata, who would come roaring back into this game, spent the first half chasing Jorginho around in an ineffective forward man‑marking job.
Is this the right way to deploy these players, to ask a bunch of violinists to sit still and bash away on the bass drums? The second half suggested not. Chelsea had gone in 1-0 up at the break. The comeback was led by Mata, another from the shelves of José’s jouers de l’escalier, first-rate attacking talents left simmering away on the back staircase.
Mata helped make the first goal, producing a driving run, then drawing a parry from Kepa Arrizabalaga with an acrobatic volley. From the rebound Martial found himself in that forbidden region close to Chelsea’s goal. Digging deep into his long-term memory he produced a classy instant finish to level the game. Eighteen minutes later, he made it 2-1 with a moment of real class, sniping inside again, cutting on to his right foot and spanking the ball with thrilling power inside the far post.
Mourinho was quietly bullish at the end, even managing to take a serene moral high ground after a scuffle on the touchline with an overexcited member of Chelsea’s coaching staff.
There will be a temptation to see a turning point, deeper gears being found, but nobody really knows how good this United team are or should be or could have been. From here it would be wonderful to see Mourinho take the lesson of these last two second-half rallies, to station Martial closer to the opposition goal than his own, to see United play like a team in furious attacking catch-up mode right from the start. There is little to lose now, beyond that feeling of possibilities just out of sight.
