"We are at rock bottom, we cannot feel any worse than this."
This will be the post mortem of all post mortems today. Surely, the pressure to come for Ole Gunnar Solskjaer will be almost unsurvivable. Everybody associated with Manchester United will be eternally thankful for his services as a player, and for the significant turnaround provided from toxicity under Jose Mourinho’s reign. He has progressed this far, but to get any further seems to be growing increasingly difficult.
Losing 5-0 to Liverpool at Old Trafford indicates utter turmoil. It's reaching the stage of resigning even being in the offing, or so it feels amongst fans. It’s an unforgivable result, and one of the dark days in the history of this football club. It doesn’t get much worse. Is it even possible to get worse? It doesn’t feel like it right now. If the club keeps supporting mediocrity, then the situation higher up here is exponentially worse than we already know. Ole is on ice as thin as he’s experienced so far during his tenure.
It feels like the tactical approach is all wrong every single week at the moment, in fact I’m not sure such approach even exists most of the time. Organisation seems to be something which this management team don’t seem to know exists, because there is a distinct lapse in that department. We got battered in the first half against Atalanta, and used the same starting team today. The tactics we deploy seem to be without any thought whatsoever, and often even beyond the team’s capabilities. When there is an aim (as proved today) it’s likely something that we aren’t even able to execute. It was as though the players were told to press, but didn't know how. Coordination is non-existent.
As I alluded to, Solskjaer tried to deploy some form of his pressing approach today - all it culminated in was the biggest lack of discipline humanly possible in this sport. The systematic disarray at the back (ultimately from the coaching, or lack of) was unfathomably bad, with criminal amounts of space frequently left for arguably the country’s most in-form team to attack. It was a thoughtless idea.
The disjointed nature of the performance was present everywhere, not just amongst the defence. It has to be admitted, every single bit of that stems through the manager: his tactics caused Liverpool to slice through his side from the very off. Individual brilliance has bailed United out of late, but against a team of Liverpool’s quality you cannot rely on such thing.
The mentality is also all over the place, mostly thanks to the players not actually knowing what they’re supposed to be doing. Very early on, the body language of the players collapsed and compounded the plethora of errors which were made. The dressing room's faith seems to be fading away, with all I saw today frustration.
The amount of issues now present are too vast to even get our heads around. To play against your arch-nemesis and not put up (or be able to put up) any fight is unforgivable. It's at the stage where the level of coaching is beginning to make the players look bad.
I mentioned this at halftime, but we had to resort to damage limitation. Manchester United resorting to damage limitation. Manchester United resorting to damage limitation, against Liverpool. Make that make sense. We’re in tatters.
It hurt Solskjaer today, clearly - he's a United man and his heroic status will never chance. Unfortunately, today could very much spell the end.
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