IT was hardly Barcelona 99, but for Erik ten Hag’s under-fire Red Devils it certainly felt like it.
Stoppage time, one goal down, and a third home league defeat on the bounce staring them in the face.
Step forward Scott McTominay like some kind of latter-day Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, to climb from the bench with two save-the-day strikes.
Goalscoring heroes don’t come unlikelier than the Scottish midfielder, for all he has been finding the net with some regularity for his country.
He was only chucked on, in increasing desperation, with three of the regulation 90 minutes to go.
Seven minutes later he was buckling under the joyous and jumping celebrations of his team-mates. Pulling it out of the fire doesn’t come more dramatic than this.
Actually, with United, we all know it does. It was clearly not in the same bracket as that “Solskjaer has won it” treble-winning Champions League final stab 24 years ago.
Not in terms of silverware, standing or status, at least. It was Brentford, not Bayern Munich, after all.
Yet when you have sunk as deep into the you-know-what as United, somehow yesterday it felt like it.
Ten Hag doesn’t need telling what lay in wait should Brentford have clung onto a lead given them by Mathias Jensen before the Reds had even managed a shot on target.
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His job may not exactly have been on the line, but questions would have been murmured, if not yet bellowed.
It would have been three home league losses in a row for the first time since 1977. It would have been defeat in six of the last eight games.
It would have been an international break filled with inquests into United’s stumbling and shocking performances.
And, as much as anyone in Old Trafford’s corridors of power would obviously deny this, it could – just could – have been the beginning of the end for this latest regime.
Thank Heavens, then, for McTominay. A man who, remember, could well have been pulling on a West Ham shirt if a deal could have been agreed in the summer.
He had already had a goal disallowed – quite correctly, too for Antony Martial’s offside before Super Scott headed in – by the time he pounced again.
This time there was no doubting, as Alejandro Garnacho just about managed to keep the ball in, before McTominay ended the penalty box pinballing by hammering into the roof.
Even then, for all it rescued a point, it would not have silenced the critics. Nor should it, either.
When a draw at home to the Bees gives United fans a buzz, you know times are hard. Fortunately it didn’t come to that.
For as we ticked into the seventh minute of stoppage time and Bruno Fernandes sent one final, hopeful free-kick into the box, Harry Maguire got his head to it.
Yes, THAT Harry Maguire. Starting his first game of the season thanks to Rafa Varane’s injury – in electric blue boots – and making an impact as eye-catching as his footwear.
For when it looped up, McTominay shrugged off the attention of Ethan Pinnock and sent a header arcing over keeper Thomas Strakosha. Game over and United improbably, undeservedly, out of jail.
While that spelt heartbreak for one keeper, for Andre Onana it was salvation…of a kind, at least.
Up to that point, United’s Cameroonian dropper of clangers had been guilty of yet another, in a Brentford opener that was a catalogue of calamities for the men in red.
It came on 27 minutes from the boot of midfielder Jensen after THREE cock-ups in the build-up made it an embarrassment for United.
Chiefly Onana, of course, whose flapped hand attempt to keep out a shot which was more of a trickle than a tornado was frankly embarrassing.
But then again, so, too, were Casemiro’s TWO powder puff challenges with Bryan Mbeumo on halfway. He lost out to the Brentford striker on both occasions.
And what on earth Victor Lindelof hoped to achieve with his cement-footed stab across his own box in playing an inadvertent one-two with Yoane Wissa, God only knows.
Maybe the Swede thought helping tee up the Bees forward for the killer pass to team-mate Jensen would earn him an assist.
All it earned was a face as red as his shirt…although not as much as Onana, who is running up a pretty impressive CV of goal-costing clangers since replacing David de Gea.
No wonder he covered his face with his shirt afterwards. He must have wanted to dig a bloody big hole to hide in as well.
To their credit, United did hammer away at the Brentford backline for virtually the entire second half, and you couldn’t fault them for spirit and energy.
But for the most part it was desperation rather than direction. The Bees were hardly pinned to the floor. Keeper Strakosha hardly needed to produce a string of worldies.
The best stop of all, in fact, came when Onana saved from Neal Maupay late on, when it was still 1-0. In that respect he did at least perform some heroics.
Yet nothing like McTominay, a man who thought days like this were a thing of the past for him at Old Trafford.
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