sport news Man United are a monster of mediocrity whose player culture is rotten to its ... trends now
I hate to break it to Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Sir Dave Brailsford but buying a different kind of pillow for Casemiro isn’t going to fix this. Getting Antony to don a pair of electrically heated shorts isn’t going to fix it, either. Manchester United is the sick man of European football and it is going to take an awful lot more than a few marginal gains to put it on the road to resurrection.
Sure, they can tell a few office staff at Old Trafford that they can’t have two seats together for the FA Cup final at Wembley later this month and Ratcliffe can garner all the easy headlines he wants with emails about how the IT department needs a decent tidy but United are a club that needs major surgery, not a few Band Aids to help with public relations.
I’ve been watching United home and away for more than 40 years. I was in the Platt Lane End at Maine Road in September 1989 when they were humiliated 5-1 by Manchester City, I was at Old Trafford in October 2011 when they lost 6-1 to City and I was at Anfield when they lost 7-0 to Liverpool in March last year.
Those performances were embarrassing but I have never seen a United side look more like a rabble, a disorganised band of disconnected, demotivated, disinterested divas than they appeared on the television pictures from Selhurst Park on Monday evening. There is embarrassing and then there are the depths United plumbed in south London.
The defeat meant United had lost 13 league games in a season for the first time in more than 30 years. It was a mismatch from the start. Palace are a lower mid-table side but they were so superior they looked like they were playing it for laughs.
Manchester United were thrashed 4-0 on an evening to forget at Selhurst Park on Monday
Manager Erik ten Hag's role was already under pressure but on the back of his side's showing against Crystal Palace, calls for him to go have grown louder
Sir Dave Brailsford (left) and Sir Jim Ratcliffe (right) are readying to make changes this summer
Eberechi Eze and Michael Olise were so far above anything United had to offer that they started showboating from early in the second half. It was as if they could not believe quite how easy it was.
It looked a bit like a training ground exercise for Oliver Glasner’s team. Actually, it was worse than that. It looked like United had turned up thinking they were playing in an exhibition game. It looked like they had sent out a vets’ team for a Premier League match. Casemiro’s a stage further on from that. I’ve seen more athletic performances in Walking Football.
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Ratcliffe, Brailsford and the rest of the gang at Ineos wanted control over the football operation at Old Trafford as a condition of their minority investment and the Glazers, who probably couldn’t believe their luck, were happy to give it to them. Now they need to do something with that control.
It’s time for some tough decisions. By that, no one means getting rid of Antony. That’s not a tough decision. Nor is dispensing with a host of other players. Some people laughed at the story that the majority of United’s squad would be up for sale in the summer but no one’s laughing any more.
Very few of the players who started the game against Palace are capable of playing a part in a team that could challenge for a title. Alejandro Garnacho and Kobbie Mainoo have the talent and the desire. Fernandes should also be at the heart of the rebuild. Beyond that, it is slim pickings.
The hard truth
