Embarrassing. Pathetic. Shambolic. I am genuinely close to running out of words to describe this Manchester United side. Last night we saw a devastating loss at Anfield for Ralf Rangnick and his team. Add in the 5-0 loss at home and this is the worst combined scoreline in the history of this fixture. Here are five things that we learnt watching one of the worst performances I’ve seen from United since the last time we lost to Liverpool.
Worst way to start a game
Going into this game, I was not confident. Obviously, you can see why. But I did have hope, a fool’s hope. You always have hope going into a game, why else would you be a fan otherwise. If you were being realistic then of course there was no chance that we would get anything, but it’s a fan’s right to be a bit delusional sometimes. And when it comes down to the biggest rivalry, the most historic rivalry in english football you’d think that the players might step their game up a bit. No. If anything they stepped down massively.
There was a bit of hope before kickoff that if we could see out the first twenty, twenty five minutes we might be able to scrape something from the game. But no. To concede within five minutes was awful. From that moment it felt inevitable. Honestly, I was surprised that they didn’t score more.
Worlds Apart
The game last night made it so apparent how different these two teams are. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Liverpool are genuinely one of the best teams in Europe right now. As much as it pains me to write that, it is true. They are capable of playing some fantastic football, with high intensity, flare, pace and power the lot. And we saw two teams that did that and played outstanding football, not last night, but two weeks ago when Liverpool drew with Man City in the league. Last night Liverpool were able to beat us 4-0 and make it look easy. They genuinely didn’t even look like getting out of third gear. There was a moment early on in the second half where I thought we looked a bit better we looked to trying at least. I was wrong, we didn’t look better, Liverpool just switched off for five or ten minutes. Genuinely an embarrassing performance.
I’m not usually one to over-rely on stats, they obviously have their part to play and I think here they sum up exactly how last night went. In terms of shots, they had 14, 5 of them were on target. We had 2 shots in the whole game 1 was on target. They had 72% possession we had 28%. 91% pass success rate for Liverpool, 73% for us. They almost tripled the number of passes that we made, they more than tripled the number of accurate passes that we made. They had 13 key passes, we had 2. It was such a terrible performance from United.
Awful defending
As I said in my preview, I was half-expecting the five at the back that we saw in the first half. In theory, it made sense. If you put five players behind the ball, chances are you might be less likely to concede. That’s in theory at least. In practice, last night for Manchester United was obviously very different. It was just awful from the defenders. No one on this team seemed to bothered to try and stop them from creating chances and scoring goals. As I mentioned some of them weren’t difficult goals to defend against. Staying in position, blocking a cross, tracking your man. These are all basic things for a footballer and no one was doing any of it. Pathetic.
Heartless
Now by no stretch of the imagination am I one of these passion merchants, where if a player slides around putting in bad challenges you can get away with anything. But to see that abject performance that was just a genuine nothingness was awful. They just didn’t try. None of the players on the pitch seemed to be trying. The only ones that even looked close to being bothered to try anything were Sancho and Elanga, and then Hannibal Mejbri for the five minutes that he was on the pitch for. The rest of them just looked like they didn’t care. This is supposed to be the biggest rivalry for this club, the biggest rivalry in the country. I am not surprised that City fans are trying to argue that they have a better rivalry with Liverpool after games like that. They don’t deserve to wear the shirt. They don’t represent what Manchester United is about. Good luck to Erik ten Hag in trying to get a tune out of some of these players, if many of them stick around that is.
Play the youth
The season is over. Top four was never going to happen. And we don’t deserve it frankly. You can’t look at this team and say that we should be playing in the best competition in Europe. No chance. There is nothing left to fight for this season. The players don’t want to play anyway, fine don’t play them. Give the youngsters a chance who will actually try and fight. They’ll show some desire and hunger to prove themselves. If they can impress in these next few games then they will definitely get more chances under a manager known for promoting youth in Erik ten Hag.