Ahmad, he’s pretty good at football, right? He’s been out for Manchester United now for however long with an injury. And he comes back into the team in a European semi-final and performs just ridiculously well, making it all look rather easy, almost insulting elite-level sport.
Because Ahmad came into this game, he came into this 30-minute cameo, if you like, with an arrogance, with a swagger, and I hate to use the word, with an aura as well. I think a crowd will so often tell you how good a footballer is.
You can tell when a player picks the ball up. The energy in a crowd is often a really good signal of how good a player is. And Ahmad, there’s this sense of anticipation, but also expectation every time he picks up the ball.
And, you know, we spoke about it this morning, Mason Mount’s impact coming from the bench. Ahmad, just as much. He was so, so aggressive. I said it in my video that I’d done on the game. I spoke about Ahmad being a very confrontational player. And what I meant by that was not someone who goes around looking for fights, but someone who goes around looking for challenges, regularly picking the ball up.
And what he wants to do, and this was literally from his first kick, we’ll see that in just a second. Every single time he got the ball, he just kind of went, hello full-back, remember me? Yeah, I’m going to toast you. He just had this arrogance with the way he was playing, a real, real arrogance. And I love to see that. I love to see that from a young player.
We’re going to get straight into this and kind of skip over a proper intro and talk about Ahmad here. Because, you know, you’re not into a moment in a game where we’re 1-0 down, hadn’t really got going on the night. And even here, we’re playing the ball quite slowly.
This is Lindelof out to Dorgu on the right-hand side. It’s all rather slow. And we’ve actually got Ahmad in the middle of the pitch here.
And this is what I’m talking about with that sense of an aura as he receives the ball. Because as he gets this ball deeper, he just kind of casually takes the first touch. He takes the first touch back towards his own goal. It’s fairly safe. The body language is very relaxed. And then it changes. It changes a flick of a switch. He just drops that shoulder to the left-hand side. He pushes the ball to the left.
And this is what I’m talking about by being aggressive. It would have been very easy for him. First touch of the match. A long time out after injury. Just to pick the ball up and give it back to Lindelof or turn and go backwards. But Ahmad’s first thought was, how can I impact this game? How can I attack the Bilbao defenders?
And you can see the effect of this. He just immediately darts into the space. And this is the effect. Players changing the tempo of football matches causes the opposition to panic defend and react and quickly try and deal with what Ahmad is doing. This is three players now though drawn to Ahmad. If there’s three on Ahmad, it means other people are going to be in room.
I mean, on this occasion, Bruno Fernandes is the player that benefits. That’s the wrong colour. But Bruno Fernandes is the player that could have benefited, right? Because he’s so open. He’s so free in the middle of the park because all the players are so focused on Ahmad.
Now actually on this occasion, the way it plays out is something a little bit different. Ahmad and Dorgu combine, which was really, really nice to see. Even this, quick, sharp combination play in the final third, moving the ball down the right-hand side. And even here, Ahmad continues to be aggressive. He takes a really big first touch to sort of make it clear he’s attacking the back line.
But I really like the second touch because it would have been quite easy for Ahmad to go down the line here and then try and cross the ball into the penalty area. Almost do quite a basic idea, you know, make an impact, attack quickly, get a ball into the box. What I love though was at this second touch. So the first touch was just a big one into the open space.
The second touch was very much a challenge of the fullback or the defender. He basically squares up the defender and just goes, by the way, I’m going to spend the next 30 minutes taking you on and trying to beat you.
And I love that attitude. He just drives at him. He backs him up right into the penalty area and gets the shot off a goal. These are literally his first touches in the match. And I just love it. It’s so, so aggressive. And it’s what United have been crying out for for a few months now, really, ever since Ahmad got that injury to go out of the team.
He just brings us something completely different. He is so unique in the Manchester United squad. There isn’t another player that strikes fear into defenders quite like Ahmad does. Of course, Bruno has this sense of inevitability when he plays. An amazing passing range. He can score from anywhere. Garnacho is a player whose movement has been causing a lot of problems recently.
But Ahmad just dribbling at people, driving at people and causing problems. Also, I just want to highlight this. Winning headers against centre-backs. He’s physically so good as well. But it was this for me. It was just every time he got the ball, he wants to let the ball roll across his body. Helped by the fact that Bilbao were being passive at the time. But he just wanted to attack this guy time and time again.
Every time he got the ball, he went, Hello, Mr. Defender. Yeah, we’re going to have a little dance here, mate. And it’s like that for Ahmad. It’s like a dance when he’s on the ball because he can go both ways. And I think what we see from a lot of players is a lot of players will throw a shimmy and they’re going to shimmy left and then go right. But it’s actually quite predictable because they always end up doing the same thing every time.
What Ahmad does or what he has is a genuine ability to go both ways. Defenders know when Ahmad comes at them and he throws that shimmy in. There’s every chance he’s actually going to go the way of the shimmy because he can come inside onto his left or he can go outside onto the right. On this occasion, the defender takes the bait.
So Ahmad shimmies inside, the defender lunges aggressively, and then Ahmad just goes round the outside. And again, absolutely toasts him. It’s just a shame about the final ball on this one. A little bit too high. But again, this whole goal, which eventually comes, is because Ahmad at the start of the move was aggressive and was taking the defenders on.
This one, this one’s a joke. This one’s an absolute joke. The mind game that he is having with the defender here is brilliant. So Yoro plays the ball into his feet. It’s not the most fizzed pass I’ve ever seen. But what Ahmad does first is just a quick check. Just sees where the defender is and sort of tries to get an assessment, get a read of how the defender is approaching it.
You know, is the defender being aggressive? Is he standing off? Is he giving me space? What Ahmad does next is he quickly accelerates towards the ball. And what this does is it sends a message to the defender. Because normally, if your player is going to race towards the ball like this, he’s probably going to take a safe touch inside. That’s the wrong thing.
But he’s going to take a safe touch inside and then perhaps play backwards. Ahmad knows, though, that the defender is expecting that. So what Ahmad does at the last second is knock it through his legs and skin him. Just skin him. Knock the ball past him and then attack the space.
And again, not only does he just spin into an area and attack space, very, very quickly he’s trying to come back inside. He’s trying to be aggressive. He’s trying to get towards the goal. Again, it would have been quite easy to go out into this space somewhere over here, to dribble in that direction.
But he doesn’t want to. He wants to be confrontational. He wants to get up against the centre-backs. And if you look at the progressive carry numbers from this match, Ahmad was in the top three for Manchester United. He barely played and he was in the top three. Now, of course, we have to consider game state.
You know, United eventually ran away with this and towards the end it was quite easy. And players were expressing themselves quite a lot. But it’s still very, very impressive. And to me, it just highlights what we’ve been missing. A player that wants to be aggressive.
Here we’re 2-1 up. We’re 5-1 up on the tie. We don’t need to be that attacking. But still, Ahmad going round on the overlap, getting himself towards the by line. And I love this. I commented on this during my match video. I think most players here play this ball early.
I think they look for that first contact. They fizz it across the box or something like that. Ahmad has an immense confidence in his own dribbling ability because he chooses, rather than the simple ball across the box, he chooses to try and beat a defender in that space.
I’ve just called it space. It’s barely a space at all. He is so close to the by line when you consider he’s moving at speed. He’s under pressure from a defender. He’s trying to actually dribble with a football as well. But he trusts himself to operate in that space. And I think that’s an amazing confidence.
And then the pick out across the box for Hoyland as well is just absolutely fantastic. Ahmad approved to us in this game. Very, very different. Very, very different to anything else that we’ve got. And, you know, he creates a bit of a headache for Amarin because, you know, it’s now a question of his best position.
Is it wing back where he can get more of the ball? Or is it sort of this 10 position where he can get the ball closer to the opposition goal? That is something we’re going to have to try and assess moving forward.
But I think right now we’re talking about Ahmad. It’s a great problem to have, right? We’ve got this amazing player who’s really good in two positions, can offer us two-way threat, and he’s just always so aggressive.
I think our attack just completely changes. I think the subs for Amarin the other night were brilliant, to be honest. They were perhaps fairly obvious, but you still had to make them, and he did. And they made an impact.
We spoke about Mount this morning. Ahmad tonight was just phenomenal. Just the way that he kept going at them. It’s amazing to see how he’s developed over the course of the season, particularly the second half of the season under Amarin, when he’s even missed the last part with injury.
That’s just how impressive this is. He’s done an amazing job, and hopefully he’s here to stay now for the long term, to be a Manchester United player for the future.
Because every time he picks the ball up, you feel like something’s going to happen. Like I said, he’s got that aura, there’s an arrogance, there’s a swagger, and for me, that’s a Manchester United player.
It’s the most obvious trait in a Manchester United player, a player that wants the ball and just loves having the ball at their feet and soaking it up, wanting to relish in these big moments, rather than hiding away for them. Like, you know, certain other players perhaps did in the first hour.
Ahmad gets the ball, there’s no hiding away. He just wants to get the ball, he wants to attack people, he wants to score goals, he wants to create chances, and that’s what United need. I think he was brilliant again in this game, and hopefully it continues because he is just so different to everything else that we’ve got.
