• Premier League

United seek to rediscover Premier League authority and maturity

Eric Cantona gave United swagger © PA Photos

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I rode toward the last fence: jump it and we were clear. I was already celebrating. Boing! Down went the pole, down went my hopes and up soared my self-disgust. It's a classic: lose concentration and forget to jump the last. I was disgusted because such a mistake is immature, callow and indicative of a half-baked competitive personality. Bah!

Manuel Pellegrini had hoped to see "a more mature Manchester City" in the Champions League this season. And they played with great maturity against Bayern Munich in midweek to keep the score at 0-0 after 89 minutes. Unfortunately, they conceded a goal in the 90th. And that's not mature at all. Boing!

Maturity is a big deal in football. With maturity comes authority: a trait most obvious when a result is calmly achieved in difficult and adversarial circumstances. But footballing maturity doesn't come from a simple accumulation of years. Some players never have it: others - all the greats, for a start - seem to have it from debut. Pele bossed the show at 16.

But maturity is not entirely about players or, for that matter, managers. I wonder - had the same City team with the same manager been representing Real Madrid, say, or even Bayern Munich - do you think they would have knocked down that final fence? Would the shirt have given them the authority they lacked as the arriviste City?

Well never mind that now, because we're back to the Premier League this weekend and no one questions City's maturity as contenders in this competition - even if it's a pretty recent acquisition. A few years ago they were just a bunch of expensive players in search of a team. Manchester United called them "noisy neighbours". It took them a while to acquire to the gravitas of champions.

But these days it's United who are trying to acquire maturity. Their search for footballing authority looks like the compelling plot of the season, just as their decline and fall was the story of the previous one.

How did they manage to win the league in 2013? I once saw an aged and toothless male lion plunder a kill from a younger male in his black-maned prime purely because he was used to winning - and both participants knew it. It was a bluff that depended on the essential callowness of the mightier lion. United's last winning season was the most colossal bluff.

But next time around, under a new manager, that sense of entitlement and maturity was scattered to the four winds. The task of manager Louis van Gaal is to find it again, and for his team that still looks awfully callow. You can buy good players and you can buy experienced players but you can't buy maturity. That's because it's a team thing, not an individual thing.

The question about new signings such as Angel Di Maria is whether they can provide Manchester United authority © PA Photos

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But it's that sense of maturity that wins the points in the closing minutes. That ability more or less defined United in the Sir Alex Ferguson years: as the clock ticked into the 80s, you knew they would score; so did the opposition. Such victories are the product of maturity: when more callow teams are asked similar questions, they coughed it up like the second lion.

United looked a bit like a grown-up team last weekend, but it's easy to do when the opposition give up. You can interpret that 4-0 win as you wish: either it was a soft victory that came at the perfect time to give confidence as United move toward a new maturity - or it was an illusory triumph in which United's immaturity was covered up by QPR's haplessness.

Now they must travel to Leicester City for a fixture that will ask more difficult questions. It's a "Sonny, is this your first beer?" kind of match. Are you really up to this? And so soon? After a traumatic start to the season, some new arrivals and one single good result, Manchester United need to convince opponents of their maturity. More important, they need to convince themselves.

United have been here before, a quarter of a century ago. In the last days of the old first division, Liverpool were the team with maturity: all the rest - no matter what the physical age of the players - were like kids hoping not to get found out. United seem to have had authority as their basic stock-in-trade forever, but there was a time before that. This competitive maturity is a hard thing to acquire and an easy one to lose. Liverpool, once masters of Europe, are a callow team these days and last season they knocked over the last couple of fences to prove it.

Lord, I remember the day when I came face-to-face with United's real authority. It was the day that Arsenal's Invincibles - the team went unbeaten though the Premier League season of 2003-04 - went to Old Trafford the following season. United reasserted their authority in devastating fashion - not because they were tactically smarter or their players were better, but because they believed they had a right to boss the English game. And at heart, Arsenal didn't.

United first acquired that sense of authority through Eric Cantona. The swaggering sense of entitlement he brought to the club was worth even more than his goals: at £1 million he is possibly the best value signing of all time, for he was the prime mover of the Ferguson years. United became the headmaster of the English game; every other club were schoolboys.

So it's not precisely about the form of those expensive new boys, Angel Di Maria and Radamel Falcao, or how Van Gaal decides to play them. It's whether or not they can give their team authority: the feeling that Manchester United are once again a grown-up club with a grown-up's right to victory. We'll have a better idea about that after lunch on Sunday.

Simon Barnes was Chief Sports Writer at The Times and UK Sports Columnist of the Year in 2001 and 2007. He writes about a wide variety for ESPN.co.uk, as well as ESPNFC.com and ESPNcricinfo. He has written more than 20 books including The Meaning of Sport and three novels. On Twitter he is @simonbarneswild

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