Four hundred grams of synthetic leather to the face. Football to the frontal cortex. Because, really, what else is there to do when you’re 4-1 down at home with negligible time remaining other than kick a ball into your opponent’s face and pray for a few minutes’ reprieve. To be fair to Jess Park, the Manchester United and England midfielder was an excellent sport, given Everton’s Ruby Mace mishap. As Everton’s Hill Dickinson Stadium emptied and United fans chanted her name, she laughed along wi
Because, really, what else is there to do when you’re 4-1 down at home with negligible time remaining other than kick a ball into your opponent’s face and pray for a few minutes’ reprieve.
To be fair to Jess Park, the Manchester United and England midfielder was an excellent sport, given Everton’s Ruby Mace mishap.
As Everton’s Hill Dickinson Stadium emptied and United fans chanted her name, she laughed along with familiar faces of Everton staff in the hallways: Yes, I did just score a brace against the club I spent a season on loan with in 2022-23, consigning you to a heavy defeat and extending my team’s unbeaten Women’s Super League (WSL) record to seven this season. But have you seen the egg between my brows that Ruby left me?
Of course, the real question isn’t about head eggs but about Park. Specifically, how do you halt this iteration of the 23-year-old? This slaloming, low-bunned wisp signed in the summer from rivals Manchester City but is already so integral to United’s attack.
Park’s deadline-day signing from City was viewed by some critics as a sideways step, but Park has swiftly established herself as one of the season’s most exhilarating players. Her brace against Everton from the bench — her second and third goals of the season, lifting her tally to three goals and one assist in nine matches — was emblematic of her transformation into one of the league’s most valuable attacking threats.
The midfielder didn’t start this match, yet it still turned on her, evidenced by Everton organising their entire game plan to negate Park’s influence… only to discover she wasn’t in the starting XI.
“That’s why Emily (Ramsey, goalkeeper) went down (inside 10 minutes),” admitted Everton manager Brian Sorensen in his post-match press conference.
“We thought Jess would have started. That’s why the pressure we started out with was four central, trying to deal with closing her down and the full-backs could have the ball a bit more, because they are still good players but they’re not as dangerous to open you up.”
For United, the upshots here are that they can still look threatening without Park, whom United manager Marc Skinner said in his post-match press conference voiced some fatigue after the midweek Champions League win against Valarenga.
United could have been 3-0 up in the opening 10 minutes, with Lisa Naalsund, Elisabeth Terland and Fridolina Rolfo all contriving to miss gilt-edged chances, ultimately allowing Everton to go 1-0 up moments later through Honoka Hayashi following a free kick.
By half-time, United had eight shots at Everton’s goal and could boast 68 per cent possession but no solid riposte. “I was relaxed on the touchline, actually, because I felt we had the quality,” said Skinner. “It just needed to be finished.”
Which is really just another term for Park, a player whose presence on opposition defences is feeling gradually more ruthless.
That is partly down to system. At City, Park was deployed deeper and more centrally with clear instructions to operate as almost an admin role between the midfield and the team’s forwards, tasked with recycling the ball and reintroducing forward players such as Khadija Shaw, Mary Fowler and Lauren Hemp to it, as the graphs below illustrate.
At United, Park has been allotted carte blanche to push up into more of a No 10 role, with Hinata Miyazawa and midfielder Julia Zigiotti Olme tasked with more of the grunt midfield work and thus allowing Park to roam on her intuition.
Despite only playing 39 minutes, Park registered five passes into the final third, the joint-fourth most alongside Anna Sandberg and behind Miyazawa, Naalsund and Riviere, all of whom started the match.
Playing in front of full-back Jayde Riviere means that when Park cuts inside to share the creative burden of United’s defence with Ella Toone, a player whom Skinner believes Park makes “come back alive”, the Canada international can overlap, putting in crosses and stretching opposition defences.
But Park’s real threat is her ball-carrying, her ability to drive at defences and create space for herself, as her first goal against Everton and United’s third goal demonstrated. Park doesn’t rely on pace so much as spatial and technical awareness, with her head constantly scanning.
It is why the threat of her inverting so preoccupied Everton in the lead-up to Sunday’s match, Sorensen having worked with Park during her loan spell three seasons ago.
“For City, she was more of a wide player, but I saw that potential in bringing her inside, and that’s also how Sarina (Wiegman) started to use her on the national team in that 10 role. That’s where she’s best,” said Sorensen.
“You don’t know if she’s going to come inside all the time, how deep she is going to go, if she’s going to stay up and work between the lines, or if she’s going to stay wide. It’s unpredictable.”
Park is far from the finished attacking product. Against Valarenga, Park saw a one-on-one opportunity scuppered as her shot slammed straight into the body of goalkeeper Tove Enblom. Against Everton, Park’s first goal took a fortuitous deflection, but her second was a composed finish skirting the 18-yard box, an area in which she had worked on the day prior in training with United.
“We’ve been working on Jess opening up her body and where she might receive the ball and different ways to finish,” said Skinner.
“In the No 10 role, you usually have one touch to set the ball, then a second to hit it. So it’s working on that speed. I’m really excited to see how Jess progresses with us and what she brings out of other players. I genuinely believe that her and Tooney become alive and are electric together. We just have to be able to adapt and evolve it.”
But in a match that felt at risk of slipping towards an inevitable tedium of United unable to convert, it was striking how calmly Park imbued the occasion with a sense of slick inevitability, of potential: United as deciders of their own fate and simultaneously of a team capable of so much more.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Manchester United, Women's Soccer
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Category: General Sports
