Benjamin Sesko had scored a goal<\/a> that really was a thing of beauty. It was a brilliant finish, scored with a single decisive touch, his fourth in 27 minutes on the pitch. Mainly, it was great because it involved use of the sidle.<\/p>\nBryan Mbeumo crossed low from the right into a crowded penalty area. At which point Sesko, who is 6ft\u00a05in, sidled past Axel Disasi. He sashayed. He snuck. A single long willowy leg shuffled in front of his man, the toe of his right boot snaking out and making perfect contact with the ball on the volley, flicking it in a perfect clean arc into\u00a0the top corner, and even then doing it with a kind of nonchalance. Don\u2019t mind me, I\u2019m just going to sidle, yep, sidling now.<\/p>\n
Disasi reacted like he had been shot between the shoulder blades with a potato gun, collapsing to his knees in an attitude of disbelief, the victim of a sidling. Sesko still has something unformed and puppyish about him, all pale, unmarked potential. But he also has five goals in six games now, only two of which he has started. Carrick talked about his finishing in glowing terms after the game. Nobody has been glowing about Sesko at United. This is good\u00a0management.<\/p>\n
And this was a good game for all its trapped energy. For long periods the London Stadium was almost totally silent, which is a strange thing in the middle of 60,000 people, most of whom are sat directly facing each other in this oddly angled sports-drome with its cliff-face stands.<\/p>\n
East London had been drenched all day in an endless mist of February drizzle. By kick\u2011off the Stratford football complex was a strange fusion of Blade Runner styling and Jack\u00a0the\u00a0Ripper skies. United lined up in the Carrick formation, a strip-it-back 4-2-3-1.<\/p>\n
Benjamin Sesko sidles past Axel Disasi to score Manchester United\u2019s late equaliser. Photograph: Justin Setterfield\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
For a while West Ham simply sat back in a solid block. They are an odd-looking team. At any given moment there are two West\u00a0Ham possibilities. They are either defending in a low block. Or Jarrod Bowen is haring off in pursuit of a pass. These are their\u00a0game states.<\/p>\n
But West Ham played well here, even if a good point will have felt like a bad one by the end. Aaron Wan-Bissaka had a brilliantly adhesive game in defence, often splayed on the turf, legs whirling around, a kind of human catherine wheel, but still managing to snag, and fish and crook the ball into his arc.<\/p>\n
There were long periods of stasis, nothing\u2011ball. At one point Lisandro Mart\u00ednez just stood with the ball in the West\u00a0Ham half and everyone waited, like giant chess pieces in a stately home garden. And\u00a0five minutes into the second half West\u00a0Ham took the lead. The goal was the work of two players,\u00a0made by four slick touches between Bowen and Tomas Soucek.<\/p>\n
It was helped by Luke Shaw\u2019s weak attempted interception, first barged away by Bowen, then hurdled by Soucek, who dinked the ball out into the path of Bowen\u2019s right-wing dash and kept running forward, making it just in time to veer between two defenders and clip Bowen\u2019s cross into the corner of the net.<\/p>\n
With 20 minutes still to go the West Ham defenders were high\u2011fiving and chest bumping a successful tackle or block. Everyone likes seeing this stuff. It feels like victory voodoo. But too early? Are we going too soon here?<\/p>\n
Yes, as it turns out. And by the end this was another good game for Carrick, whose team had never before been a goal behind, never had to chase this kind of game. There were still good signs here, even in the fact this United team looked like they actually wanted to play football right to the end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On nights such as these it can feel as though football is choosing to remind you of its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":472086,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":["post-472085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-football","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=472085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472085\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/472086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=472085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=472085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=472085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}