Already, the new Erik ten Hag/Ineos project is on the back foot. This 3-0 shellacking by Liverpool could have been far more humiliating – and damaging. Two defeats from three Premier League outings, with only three points, is a dismal way to sign off before the international break, as Ten Hag and company seek to regroup a mere 16 days after the season’s start.
Trying to write this collapse off as blip is fanciful because on show was a failure in basic competence, from front to back, apart from the goal-costing catastrophes engineered by a hapless Casemiro.
Here we come to a pertinent off-field question as well. To witness the 20-year-old Toby Collyer being asked to replace the Brazilian at half-time for a senior debut is no calling card of the slick strategy Ineos’s revolution is supposed to bring. If Collyer appeared lost, the greater issue is how United could enter this encounter with their fiercest rivals two days after the market closed with only one senior holding midfielder (Casemiro) eligible to play, after having all summer to fix the glaring hole in Ten Hag’s squad.
Beforehand, Manuel Ugarte, the manager’s new £42m defensive midfielder, was paraded. Bought to dislodge Casemiro, he arrived too late for clearance, and you have to wonder why the deal was so delayed, especially given the 32-year-old’s decline.
In July, during pre-season training at UCLA, Casemiro was spied flinging himself around to make last-ditch tackles. A mark of desperation, this proved an augury of the sad tale of his first half as his disintegration cost United two Luis Díaz goals. In added-time of the first period, boos greeted Casemiro’s latest error, a mid-range pass that went to precisely no teammate and bounced into acres of Liverpool turf. What followed was a hang of his head in sorrow, Anthony Taylor blowing for the break, and Collyer jogging on to the pitch to warm up, taking instruction from a coach, Darren Fletcher, ahead of the second half.
Casemiro was not the only culprit in red. At centre-forward, Joshua Zirkzee, on a first United start, missed clear chances and showed a clumsy touch. André Onana’s tendency to direct high balls straight out or to the opposition was sighted once more. The reinstated Alejandro Garnacho was ineffective, as was Bruno Fernandes, and then we arrive at the curious case of Marcus Rashford.
With Ugarte to succeed Casemiro, the bigger headache for Ten Hag is a 26-year-old whose normal state these days is becalmed and toothless: the diametric opposite of how your star forward should be.
Left out of Lee Carsley’s England squad, goalless and shotless beforehand, Rashford remains the same and has now gone 245 minutes without registering. Retained by Ten Hag today, he needed to spark his season but again failed after a brightish beginning that featured effervescent bursts, a trip to a defensive zone to hold off Trent Alexander-Arnold, and the cleverness of thought when working a deft throw-in move with Diogo Dalot by running in behind Liverpool.
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With his lightning pace, a 200m Olympic champion physique, devilry and finishing lethal enough to score 30 times two seasons ago, Rashford’s fall-off in form is one more conundrum Ten Hag has to ponder before United return to action at Southampton on 14 September. It is a mystery that would baffle Miss Marple because after not scoring, too, in the final nine games of last term (including for England), you have to go back to 17 March and United’s breathless 4-3 FA Cup knockout of Liverpool for the last time this son of Wythenshawe managed a goal.
This is an age for a man who is the club’s highest earner, whose salary of more than £350,000 a week is paid, in the main, for him to score and win matches. After being pulled off 65 minutes into the 2-1 defeat at Brighton last weekend, football’s opinion factory had speculated on what might be eating him. A strand, revived from the debate over the dire eight-goal return last season, concerned Rashford’s off-pitch wellbeing. But to learn of him watching United’s under-18s beat Liverpool’s 2-0 at Carrington on Saturday suggested a commitment to the club cause and a positive sign that the goals might flow again soon.
Not against Liverpool, as he again misfired, as too did Casemiro, and United as a whole. Already the narrative resembles last year’s one of staggering from matchday to matchday in hope rather than with belief.
