Football has a habit of making grand extrapolations look supremely foolish. And so, after a week-long sugar rush around the genius of Erik ten Hag and the transformative presence of Casemiro, Manchester United lose 7-0 to a supposedly enfeebled Liverpool. It is the type of result that defies rational deconstruction. All I could safely say was that this was the worst performance I have seen by an English club in a game of this magnitude.
There are times when on-pitch implosions assume a strange multiplying power, when even once-confident teams are sucked into a vortex of ineptitude. It happened to Brazil as the host nation in a World Cup semi-final, when a 7-1 defeat to Germany arrived as a bolt from a clear blue Belo Horizonte sky. Nothing captured the sense of astonishment that night like the image in the stands of one woman, in a jaunty green-and-yellow hat, eyes darting left and right in search of some explanation or consolation, anything to mitigate the horror.
The same bleak incredulity assailed United fans at Anfield, many of whom had left long before Roberto Firmino scored Liverpool’s seventh. The unravelling was so spectacular that these supporters did not even have the satisfaction of targeting one particular fall guy. True, Luke Shaw, hailed seven days earlier for his dead-ball delivery against Newcastle, gave a display so dismal that you began to understand why Jose Mourinho had never rated him.
But for all-round lack of professionalism, it would be hard to top the contribution of Bruno Fernandes, who somehow combined diving with feigning an injury, failing to track back and shoving the assistant referee. And this was the captain. For a team we are led to believe is undergoing profound cultural change, with senior players at last summoning a semblance of leadership, that is quite the indictment.
Sport often lends itself to a crude absolutism. Just as there was the temptation to call Erik ten Hag an alchemist after achieving United’s first silverware for six years, there are now fresh mutterings that his gifts are just some elaborate illusion. These impulses should be resisted. The more sober judgment is that United, having kept parity for 43 minutes, succumbed to a brain fade so dramatic that it confounds any logic or pattern.
Except this seems too easy a way out. United are too great an institution, and Ten Hag is too highly-paid a manager, for this humiliation merely to be shrugged off as a freak occurrence. Losing by seven to Liverpool was a fate that had not been inflicted in the club’s 145 years of history. It is not glib to suggest that it would have been unthinkable during Sir Alex Ferguson’s reign. The reverence he had for this clash of the two biggest beasts in the English game was such that pride would have forbidden it.
In Ferguson’s 26 years in charge, the gravest embarrassment he suffered in this fixture was a 4-0 loss at Anfield in 1990. No wonder, 33 years on, the Scot looked so miserable observing United’s disgrace of a second-half display. Not once, across four decades of management, had a side of his shipped seven goals. Six was chastening enough: indeed, when United disintegrated to a 6-1 derby defeat to Manchester City in 2011, he described it as his “worst day in football”. This is an experience grimmer still. For United to be on the wrong end of such a scoreline in any match is unthinkable. For it to happen against Liverpool is cause for existential angst.
The cold reality is that there is still a dysfunction at United’s heart. Across the last 10 league games between the two at Anfield, the aggregate scoreline is 36-2 in Liverpool’s favour. For all the strides taken under Ten Hag, there remains a flakiness, as if the dip in standards since Ferguson’s time has still not been fully eradicated. And there is a sense that by celebrating their Carabao Cup triumph so hard, United may have committed football’s cardinal sin of complacency. It would be a stretch to imagine Ferguson indulging such an orgy of self-congratulation at that victory, especially on social media.
The solution does not lie in spraying yet more money at the Ten Hag project. Napoli, 15 points clear in Serie A on a fraction of United’s outlay, show that greatness is not unlocked by kleptomania alone. Instead, United need to channel the Ferguson philosophy on setbacks. “You don’t forget it,” he once said. “My purpose was to make sure that it never happened again. The next match was another world. That determination is in you. It’s either there or it’s not.” We will discover soon enough if Ten Hag has the requisite spirit, if he can convince these mercurial players that the only response to being poleaxed is to jump straight back up.
