If ever a goal summed up a football team in disarray it was Liverpool‘s opener at Old Trafford.
A series of ill-judged attempts to press their opponents from Manchester United‘s defenders left Mo Salah, the best player in the Premier League if not the planet, free as a bird and bearing down on the last man, Luke Shaw with Andy Robertson flying to his left and Naby Keita keeping himself onside to the right. Salah slipped in Keita, Keita slipped the ball past David De Gea and just like that, United were a goal down after less than five minutes.
At times against Watford last weekend, it looked as though Liverpool were playing with a few extra players such was the ease with which they popped and zipped the ball around their opponents. It isn’t a great reflection on Ole Gunnar Solskjaer or his coaching team that Manchester United were equally lax with their press on Sunday. Just as Salah had three precious seconds to pick out Keita for the first goal, Trent Alexander-Arnold had time to put the kettle on, make a brew and take a few sips before teeing up Diogo Jota for a tap-in for the second.
Harry Maguire and Luke Shaw, regular starters for one of the biggest clubs in the world and the fifth best country in the world according to Fifa’s league table, momentarily transformed into Sunday League-level defenders, bumping cartoonishly into one another on the edge of the box to leave Alexander-Arnold the freedom of Old Trafford.
Incredibly, it went from bad to worse to outright disastrous. Salah made it three before 40 minutes and four before half-time, both goals a continuation of a theme from the first two: Liverpool had space and lots of it. If it were a heavyweight bout, it would have been stopped to save United from further damage. Cristiano Ronaldo seemed intent on pressing the ejector button to get himself out of there, wildly kicking out at Curtis Jones twice to earn a yellow card that could easily have been red. Some supporters did, departing the Theatre of Nightmares during the half-time break.
Salah completed his hat-trick five minutes after the restart, racing clear of the back four before toe-poking a finish into the far corner after being picked out by an exquisite Jordan Henderson pass. Again, the lack of pressure on the ball from those in red shirts was astounding. Pre-match talk revolved around Ronaldo’s rather relaxed attitude to the concept of pressing, but nobody in the United side seemed to fancy doing it much on Sunday. Liverpool played through the lines with breathtaking ease.
And on the rare occasions in which United players actually did get close to their counterparts, it was usually to launch into a ill-disciplined, frustrated lunge. Bruno Fernandes could have gone for fouling Curtis Jones, as could Harry Maguire for scything through Jota, before Paul Pogba was eventually dismissed for a wild studs-up slide challenge that resulted in Keita being taken off on a stretcher.
The numbers on the Old Trafford scoreboard made for grim reading, but the underlying ones across the season aren’t great either. No team has made more errors leading to shots (8); only Newcastle and Watford have kept fewer clean sheets (1); only four teams have conceded more goals (16). Some will claim, off the back of such a battering, that the personnel isn’t good enough, but that is too simplistic an argument. A different coach, like, say, Antonio Conte, could turn this collection of defenders into a cohesive unit.
But it is becoming increasingly obvious that Solskjaer is unable to fix major structural issues in this team. When performances and results drop far enough, a manager’s position becomes untenable. The decision-makers at United have been reticent to swing the axe on a beloved former player who has improved the club’s league position with each of his seasons in the post. But there can be no doubt that after a result like this, Solskjaer’s future is looking bleak.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3Ebtu5z
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