The obvious question after this 2-0 defeat to Chelsea is how much longer United will continue to lose games under the current manager, as opposed to losing games under the next one. But it is also a mark of the dysfunction of this club, its ambient levels of sadness, that this matters so little. Here we have another staging point in the progress of the Manchester United ghost ship, where even sacking a manager carries almost zero tension, where it feels like something that has basically already happened.
This is a club that can make you into a relic of the past even while you’re still walking around taking training and drawing a salary. Michael Carrick is miles away from being the actual story here. For the record, the United manager is now a little more pre-doomed, pre-sacked, pretty much already lounging around in one of those holiday adverts with Tony Pulis joshing about what’s for lunch.
This defeat means United haven’t won a game since early September. At full time only the fact that Coventry and Sunderland would be playing each other later in the afternoon ruled out the prospect of an end-of-day bottom place. Chuck in a Carabao Cup exit and 20th spot in the Champions League mega-table.
Troubled times, then, for the latest semi-permanent navy wool suit in the United dugout. Something will now happen, most likely Carrick’s removal once the appropriate replacement is lined up. What happened here was almost by the by.
Although it still provided some pretty vivid evidence of where this club is. If there was a key moment, it arrived with 48 minutes gone and the score still 0-0. At which point Morgan Rogers scored a goal that captured entirely what Manchester United is.
In real time, this felt like one of those football moments, where the metaphor, the symbolism is almost too much, the nudge in the ribs a little too hard. Rogers took the ball on the edge of the centre circle and just kept running in a straight line through sudden empty spaces where there should have been a thing called Manchester United. Instead he found an anti-United, a non-United.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
