Over the course of a summer, forgetting things about football happens almost inevitably.
Wayne Rooney spends his summers forgetting how to control a ball, for instance, and every year Ryan Giggs edges closer to forgetting what it was to be young, hopeful and alive.
Those predicting how the upcoming season will play out forget things, too. This year, there’s a strong chance that a lot of people predicting Manchester United will finish third in the Premier League have forgotten exactly how good Robin van Persie is.
One game of the new campaign was a suitable corrective.
The Dutchman owned it against Swansea City in a 4-1 road win on Saturday. No touch was wasted, his movement allowed for Danny Welbeck’s first goal and obviously he scored two goals of the kind of quality that only five other strikers in the world are capable of duplicating. Pointing that bit out barely needs doing, and yet here we are.
Of course, no one forgot that van Persie was good at being a footballer before that Swansea game. No one imagined that he wasn’t the Premier League’s top scorer in each of the last two seasons and that his goal against Aston Villa that wrapped up last season’s Premier League title wasn’t the most spectacular construction in the last twelve months’ worth of football. But it was easy to misplace exactly how good he is.
When you were weighing up title contenders for this season, player for player, pros and cons, it was difficult to give van Persie enough weight in your calculations. It was difficult, because to actually conceptualise a player being able to drag an entire team through a season sounds completely ridiculous. And yet, here is my theory, post-Swansea: it’s not completely ridiculous.
Manchester United is missing a managerial genius, a central midfielder worth anyone’s time and Rooney’s best effort. These facts remain in place, even after beating Swansea in Wales. Its defence is excellent, but an inspiring team it is not, either collectively or individually.
It’s just that somehow, as it turns out, one player can cancel most of that out, most weeks. Against Swansea, United spent half an hour interpreting the idea of football as a spectator sport entirely literally, being passed around like chumps, before van Persie moved off the back of Chico Flores onto a deflected pass and scored with an improvised, right-footed half-volley. Swansea’s Ashley Williams appeared so in awe of the attempt that he actually facilitated it by moving, obligingly, out of the way.
These are the kind of things that you do when you’re van Persie. The game changed in an instant and United cruised from there; from chumps to champions via one moment from one player. Welbeck scored twice after that, but it had hardly been coming until that point.
A reminder – because he was doing the same thing this time last year, too; this isn’t a reaction, it’s a realisation – of how much is possible when you have one player in possession of that kind of supreme, freakish talent.
And this is what it means.
First, it means United could still be rubbish – it could still be less convincing than Chelsea and Manchester City, it could still lack a central midfield all season and Rooney could surrender to temptation and finally become more ego than human being – but United could also get away with all of those potential flaws because it has van Persie.
A league season is a long time, but it’s also 38 individual games. When he’s on form, is it actually possible for a van Persie team to lose? Answer: Yes, it is possible, but it’s quite difficult.
Second, it means that United, unless they do transfer business they’ve been unsubtly leaking that they want to do all summer, are going to rely heavily on van Persie. Rooney or no Rooney, van Persie is the player who breaks teams open in the first instance. Rooney hasn’t been that in two years.
Unless Luka Modric comes, or Cesc Fabregas turns up, or Mesut Ozil makes a terrible mistake that he regrets for the rest of his life and somehow becomes a United player, then van Persie will have to be the player that opens up opponents in most games, and he’ll have to win on his own, some games.
Now, this kind of reliance sounds unhealthy. How could it not? But the primary definition of a good team is whatever works to win, nobody specifies the balance between collective and (singular) individual responsibility.
And, more than that, the fact about relying on van Persie is that if you have van Persie in your team to rely on too much, you also, by necessity, have van Persie in your team, which probably makes up for the first bit. It took about 25 minutes of the new season to remind a lot of people of that.
Ethan Dean-Richards in a London-based writer. Follow Ethan on Twitter.