• Manchester United v Hull City, Wednesday, midnight
Alex Ferguson had a point, on one level at least.
“The team is playing really well and he has been very unlucky,” the former Manchester United manager said of incumbent Jose Mourinho in an interview with the BBC last week.
“He has had six 1-1 draws and in every game he has battered the opposition. If they hadn’t had all these draws, they would be challenging Chelsea [for the title].”
United’s misfortune is a topic Mourinho has himself touched upon on numerous occasions this term. One such example came in November, when Olivier Giroud’s late equaliser at Old Trafford cost his side two points in a crunch clash with Arsenal.
“I have nothing to say against my players, but I feel sorry for them because we feel like a defeat and Arsenal is feeling like a victory,” the Portuguese said. “We all know inside that in this moment we are the unlucky team in the Premier League.”
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Things have picked up for United since then. Last week’s 2-1 loss to Hull City in the second leg of their League Cup semi-final was the first time they have been defeated in 18 matches in all competitions, while they are currently unbeaten in 13 top-flight outings dating back to a 4-0 thrashing by Chelsea over three months ago.
If Mourinho’s men do fail in their bid for a Uefa Champions League spot this season – ahead of the midweek round of fixtures, in which Hull travel to Old Trafford late Wednesday, sixth-placed United are four points adrift of the top four – they will probably look back at the six stalemates cited by Ferguson as the primary reason why.
United can justifiably argue that they were by far the better team in each of their 1-1 draws with Stoke City (both home and away), Arsenal, West Ham United and Everton, while on another day they could easily have beaten Liverpool at home, too.
They were even more hard done by when Burnley escaped with a 0-0 draw from the two sides' meeting in late October: United had a total of 38 attempts – 31 more than Sean Dyche's charges – yet were left frustrated after failing to make the breakthrough. One prominent Expected Goals model, an analytical tool which measures the quality of chances a side creates based on factors such as the location of each shot, calculated that United created 2.9 expected goals that day and conceded only 0.3.
All of which leads to the wider question of what luck in football really is. United may have dominated large portions of the aforementioned encounters, fashioning plenty of clear-cut opportunities and allowing their opponents relatively few, but they are at least partly culpable for their failure to score enough of those chances to ensure they emerged victorious.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to dispute Ferguson and Mourinho’s suggestion that United’s points return in many of their matches at Old Trafford has not accurately reflected the quality of their performances.
Rather than looking back, though, it is vital that they focus on getting the better of Hull in front of their own supporters on Wednesday. This is the type of game that a team like United cannot afford to drop points in too often – Chelsea, for instance, have lost to Tottenham Hotspur, Liverpool and Arsenal this season but sit at the summit because they have been extremely reliable against those sides below sixth spot in the standings.
United are still in the mix for the top four, but any further slip-ups – starting with the upcoming showdown against Marco Silva’s strugglers – could be fatal to their prospects of returning to the Champions League in 2017/18.
Creating chances will not be enough. United must convert them too.
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