Manchester United take first bold steps into a Cristiano Ronaldo-free future - The Warm-Up

Our fault for missing the build-up, perhaps, but we were a good way through the first half before it hit us. No Ronaldo. Not in Manchester United's starting eleven. Not on the bench. Not even in the conversation. Here is a whole entire football match that had absolutely no connection to Cristiano Ronaldo or his place in the pantheon. It was oddly liberating. Well, until we realised we were thinking about him anyway. He always wins.

Anyway, this now puts United in a slightly unusual position: a soap opera in search of a main character. Marcus Rashford seems the obvious choice, and here he scored perhaps the best goal of his career, a slithering run from deep in his own half that unzipped Burnley entirely, capped with a dismissive finish into the side netting. But then he ran over to the edge of the field, and just smiled and jigged around a little bit. Real superstars have a signature celebration. Work to be done there.

Up the other end, Martin Dubravka made a bold play to reconfigure United as an avant-garde physical comedy: here a missed punch, there a messed-up back-pass, everywhere a save back towards his own goal. We were intrigued by his audition and would like to see more; sadly, we fear his material will be too challenging for Ten Hag.

Still, for United that's another win, another step towards a trophy, and another opportunity to look silly on television avoided. It hasn't always been entirely convincing, but Erik ten Hag is slowly restoring Old Trafford's reputation as a tricky place to go. United lost the first league game of the season at home to Brighton, and the first European game at home to Real Sociedad, but those early wobbles aside it's nine played and eight won. Liverpool, Arsenal and Spurs have all been sent home with no points. At the very least, it means Ten Hag and his team aren't trying to do their work in an atmosphere of febrile hostility, and that's probably constructive.

As for Burnley, it still makes very little sense to see this club playing this football. It's fun. It's pretty. But that's on us. Ex-boss Sean Dyche casts a long shadow over our expectations, but not apparently over this team, who weren't far off causing United real problems and, perhaps, igniting another round of Ronaldo discourse. Oh no, we thought about him again. Reset the clock.

There's nothing quite like the Sports Personality of the Year Award - for good and for bad.

So double congratulations are due to Beth Mead: first for winning the thing, and second for winning the thing as a footballer, the sixth person and the first woman to do so. And while comparing awards across years is not exactly fair, given that some years have major tournaments and others do not, this award feels more like the one that Bobby Moore picked up in 1966 - the shining light of a shining team - as opposed to Michael Owen's 'nice goal' award in 1998, or the 'well done, you've been going ages' nod that Ryan Giggs picked up in 2009.

And England cleaned up elsewhere, taking Team of the Year, while Sarina Wiegman was named Coach of the Year. Add in Jill Scott's triumph in I'm A Celebrity… and a pattern becomes clear. For all that football is the most popular sport in Britain, there has always been a sizeable proportion of the public that views the game with distaste and the players with barely concealed contempt. It takes something quite remarkable to break that down, both in terms of sporting achievement and, yes, personality. Winning the Euros is hard. Persuading football-sceptic SPOTY-voters that you're worthy of a place alongside the jockeys and the Olympians: that's basically magic.

With the World Cup all neatly folded away and safely locked into the past tense, it's time to start investigating the biggest question about the aftermath. No, not the fixture congestion. Nor the possible hangover. It's time to find out what exactly happens when you give Erling Haaland a month's holiday, while sending all his opponents off to have their hearts broken in the sunshine.

The obvious conclusion is that he'll spend this time racking up absurd numbers, starting with tonight's League Cup game against Liverpool. But then again, he was already racking up absurd numbers; he was already making defenders look like they'd just come off the back of a month's hard labour. Where does he go from there? Can he get more ludicrous? What would that even look like?

Well, maybe. But the truly scary thing about Haaland isn't any one part of his game. It's not that he's tall enough to disrupt air traffic or strong enough to snap a lamppost in half. It's that he's inevitable. On he goes, relentless, remorseless, a straight ruled line through chaos. In the long run, we're guessing that Haaland before the World Cup and Haaland after the World Cup will look much the same, to the eye and in the data. It's just that everybody else will be falling apart around him.

Thinking about SPOTY has made us hungry for more highly specific awards. So congratulations to Mapi Leon, inaugural winner of the Dinkiest Free Kick on a Wednesday Really Close to Christmas Award, as voted for by the Warm-Up.

One of the other footballers to win the BBC's big shiny camera was David Beckham, who picked up the award in 2001, a couple of months after that free-kick against Greece. Beckham may spend his time these days being professionally handsome for the highest bidder, but it's always worth reminding yourself just how good a player he was. As Greece knew all too well: he'd scored more or less the same free-kick in Athens a few months before.

One World Cup over, another one just seven months away. Australia-New Zealand 2023 kicks off in July, and if you enjoyed Morocco's antics in Qatar, you'll be delighted to learn that their women's team, having finished runners up in AFCON 2022, have made it to the big tournament for the first time.

Here's Shireen Ahmed for Global Sports Matters, writing about the complicated but insistent rise of women's football in the Middle East and North Africa: "The success of the Morocco women’s team was no accident. In 2020, the Royal Moroccan Football Federation unveiled a four-year plan to develop a strong women’s program that they hoped would dominate Africa. Currently, Morocco is the only country in the world to have two tiers of professional women's football, including access to world-class complexes."

It's Manchester City vs. Liverpool in the Carabao Cup, and it's Chelsea vs. PSG in the Women's Champions League.