Lisandro Martinez: The night Manchester United’s short king stood tall

United’s new centre-half proved that great defending is not always about being the biggest and strongest

It began less than a minute in with a gentle shove of Mohamed Salah’s shoulder during a break in play. Not long after that, there was a body check on the Liverpool winger as he attempted to press David de Gea. Luis Diaz got a taste too, with a push into his back down by the right-hand corner flag at the Stretford End, sending him stumbling into the advertising hoardings.

Much has been made of Lisandro Martinez’s relatively modest stature for a centre-half but whatever he lacks due to his 5ft 9in in height, he makes up for by acting 10-men wide. No United player since Rafael da Silva had approached these meetings of English football’s greatest rivals with the requisite level of aggression until Martinez. This was the night Manchester United’s short king stood tall.

Martinez arrived from Ajax last month with a reputation for belligerence and that belligerence struck a chord with a crowd that had waded through police cordons and crumpled-up cans of lager to reach their seats in a combative mood. Even those who refused to enter Old Trafford and instead continued to protest against the ownership on Sir Matt Busby Way would have liked what they would have seen had they been inside.

No new arrival should or will placate opposition to the Glazers, but when they play as well as Martinez did here, they can at least provide a 90-minute distraction. His aggression was infectious, so much so it even provoked a post-match argument between Jurgen Klopp and Bruno Fernandes. The Liverpool manager was not happy that Martinez had stayed down after what he sarcastically described as an “awful” Fabio Carvalho challenge.

Erik Ten Hag, who prioritised reuniting with Ajax’s player of the year upon his own arrival in Manchester, was altogether more impressed. “I think that [aggression] is what he brings into the squad,” he said. “I call it grinta. The South American he is, that is one of his attributes. He can bring it into the squad and into this team but you also saw it against Brighton, where he brought a really good performance.”

“Grinta” roughly translates as grit or determination. Despite being an Italian word, Ten Hag associates it most with South American football and has valued it highly within the squads he has worked with. “In South America – and Argentina in particular – players have the absolute will to win,” he said at Ajax, discussing the influence of Martinez and his compatriot Nicolas Tagliafico. “This has to do with controlled emotion. Being able to introduce grinta is an important weapon.”

It is why Martinez earned himself the nickname “El Carnicero” - the butcher - during his time in Amsterdam, but that metaphor could equally apply to the way he carves through the opposition in possession as well as out of it. On several occasions against Liverpool, Martinez found teammates in space further up the pitch with passes that even most modern-day centre-backs would struggle to pull off, including switches of play and a critical pass to set off the move that led to Jadon Sancho’s opener.

Martinez celebrates with United’s first goalscorer Jadon Sancho (AFP/Getty)

This composure in possession also helped Martinez with his most critical contribution of the evening: preventing Fernandes from scoring an unfortunate own goal while the score was still 1-0. Martinez’s positioning to block his teammate’s sliced, goal-bound clearance was fortunate, but the poise with which he handled the situation, and the speed at which he controlled and cleared the bouncing ball before Roberto Firmino followed in the rebound helped to keep United’s lead intact.

It is still very early days in Martinez’s Old Trafford career. This was his third appearance in English football and only the second in which he has lasted beyond half-time. Ten Hag played down the significance of his substitution in the 4-0 humiliation at Brentford, with the United manager insisting he could have taken off any one of 11. But Thomas Frank’s admitted to taking inspiration from Brighton, playing more direct than usual and targeting the left-hand side of United’s defence seemed telling.

Even this game was not quite the test it might have been for Martinez, ironically, because of this Premier League season’s other leading example of grinta so far. With Darwin Nunez serving the first instalment of a three-game suspension for his headbutt on Crystal Palace’s Joachim Andersen, Liverpool’s attack at Old Trafford was not especially blessed with the blend of speed, power and physicality that some believe will trouble United’s new centre-half further down the line.

Those on the other side of the argument point to his league-leading percentage of aerial duels won in the Eredivisie last season or his shackling of Erling Haaland in the Champions League group stages as evidence that he will be able to physically compete in the Premier League. Time will tell. But what Martinez demonstrated against Liverpool was that right mentality is more important than being the biggest and strongest, and great defending is not measured in feet and inches.