The Warm-Up: Nemanja Matic and David De Gea save limp Manchester United once more

If you watched Manchester United’s heist against Crystal Palace on Monday night in a pub, there will presumably have been at least one person in there who sagely nodded and said: “Well, they won but played badly. Sign of champions, that.” The Warm-Up suspects more reliable sign of champions would be a team who did enough in the previous 89 minutes not to require an injury-time belter from range to beat a team in the bottom three, but maybe we’re just nit-picking.

Things weren’t looking good for United for the most part, having gone 2-0 down to Palace through Patrick van Aanholt and Andros Townsend, leaving Jose Mourinho hopping mad on the touchline.

“We started bad once more,” said Mourinho. “Not pressing the ball, not pressing the opposition and giving them too much space. Then they scored the goal. In the second half we conceded again, a goal to show kids in academies around the country that top teams can concede silly goals.”

Things picked up after that. Chris Smalling nodded in one, Romelu Lukaku avoided shouts for handball to smartly turn in the equaliser then, with the sands of time slipping away, Nemanja Matic launched an incongruous thriker of a volley into the net from miles, miles out.

“You need luck to win in the last minute but I say we deserved it because our domination in the last half hour was huge,” said Mourinho, his blood pressure returning to normal.

Eden Hazard comes across as a pretty relaxed guy. Not much gets him stressed, you’d imagine. However, he did seem pretty irked during Chelsea’s defeat to Manchester City at the weekend, and you can’t really blame him: not playing in his best position, against the best team in the country, when the general gameplan seemed to be damage control.

“I had the feeling that I’d ran, but that I hadn’t played a game of football,” Hazard said. “That’s a pity. We could have played on for three hours, but I wouldn’t touch the ball. It only went better at the end of the game.”

Those who were there say Hazard didn’t seem particularly angry as he spoke, but it was unlikely to exactly boost his contentment levels at Chelsea, and right around the time when he theoretically might be signing a new contract too. This might be the worst possible time for him to be annoyed with the club.

A slightly troubling development at Chelsea over the weekend, when N’Golo Kante fainted in training before their trip to face Manchester City on Sunday. Kante was left out of the game after he briefly passed out at the club’s training ground on Friday, causing concern all round.

However, a doctor was reportedly on the scene quickly and various medical tests came back clear. The cause of the incident is still not known, but at the moment it seems that Kante’s omission from the team to face City was a precaution.

Players use lots of things for motivation: encouragement, discouragement, the thoughts of a loved one, abuse from fans, and now, specifically Thomas Muller, a newborn foal.

“The first foal of the season was born last night,” Muller, whose wife has a horse stable, said after scoring twice in Bayern’s 4-0 win over Freiberg on Sunday. “It’s like becoming a dad. This fired me up even more.”

The reliance on David de Gea, a theme of, well, the last five years, popped up again for Manchester United on Monday. He made an extraordinary save from Christian Benteke that would have been a season highlight for most keepers, but for him felt relatively routine. For the goalkeeping heads among you, poring over the replays, watch for De Gea stopping following the ball as the cross is delivered and instead focusing on Benteke, thus giving him an extra nanosecond to react. He’s decent.

We exaggerate, of course, but can you remember the last time a theoretically big team relied on one player quite so much? And a goalkeeper to boot? You think the last few years at United have been bad, imagine it without De Gea. Or, conversely, imagine what Arsenal might be like if they had him…

Jonathan Wilson takes us through the more troubling aspects of Manchester City’s win over a non-performing Chelsea at the weekend.

A very happy 64th birthday to Harald Schumacher. We can only assume he’s sharing a glass of something chilled with Patrick Battiston.

It’s the Champions League, Jim, but not as you know it. Unless something absolutely remarkable happens this evening, we will have two processions to watch. Liverpool are 5-0 up against Porto after the first leg, while Real Madrid hold a 3-1 advantage over a Neymar-less PSG. Alternatively, there’s a full block of Championship games, if that tickles you a little more.