Manchester United's new season lasted seventeen minutes before it began to unravel. By full time at the MKM Stadium on Saturday, Michael Carrick's side had been beaten 2-0 by a Hull City team playing its first Premier League match in nine years, and by Sunday the inquest had settled squarely on Luke Shaw.
Semi Ajayi pounced on a loose ball in the box to put the newly promoted Tigers ahead in the 17th minute. Nobel Mendy, a club-record signing from Rayo Vallecano worth just over £20m, doubled the lead just before half-time on his competitive debut, rising to head in a Regan Slater free-kick beyond goalkeeper Senne Lammens.
It was enough to hand Hull their first-ever Premier League win over United and to turn Old Trafford's opening weekend into a genuine crisis rather than a routine three points.
Appearing on BBC's Match of the Day, Wayne Rooney turned his analysis on his old club's defending for the second goal, and on Shaw in particular. "This is schoolboy defending from Luke Shaw," Rooney said, explaining that the left-back had dropped roughly five yards behind United's back line as Slater's delivery came in — leaving Mendy free to attack the ball unchallenged and United with no way to intervene once the cross was played.
ONE, reporting on Rooney's comments, described it as a "children's mistake" that broke an otherwise settled defensive line — Rooney's point was less about a single lapse than a moment of lost concentration turning a routine set piece into a clean header on goal.
Carrick was measured afterwards, calling it "a typical one of those games, with a newly promoted team at home" rather than dwelling on individual errors. His captain was more pointed. "Same mistakes as we did last season, every away game we give too much of the ball to them," Bruno Fernandes said, framing the defeat as a continuation of issues United had not fixed over the summer rather than a one-off shock.
Marcus Rashford's introduction from the bench in the second half offered one point of interest amid the gloom — his first competitive appearance in 618 days — but he found little way through a Hull defence that needed to do very little else after the break.
For Shaw, the criticism lands at an awkward moment. Now 31 and in the final year of his contract, he had just completed a full Premier League campaign, starting all 38 league matches for United last season, and finished Saturday's game with four key passes to his name. None of that softened Rooney's assessment of the one moment that mattered.
For Hull, promoted back to the top flight for the first time since 2017, it was as complete a start as they could have hoped for — built on a well-worked opener and a record signing announcing himself with the club's second goal on his league debut.
United's response comes quickly: fellow-promoted Ipswich Town visit Old Trafford the following weekend, another newly promoted side United, on Saturday's evidence, cannot afford to underestimate again.
