Why the Reds have got the blues

Not so much the hair dryer: more a gentle home perm. Contemplating the increasingly less youthful visage of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer as he looked on powerlessly while his very expensive Manchester United side were dismembered by Liverpool, you couldn’t help wonder what Sir Alex Ferguson, glowering and irascible in the stands above, would have done with those players. He would certainly have got something more out of the infantile and malicious Paul Pogba, sent off for a mean tackle which betrayed his manager and his teammates. But as Solskjaer was clearly a Ferguson appointment, shouldn’t the old bully take a share of the responsibility? With a weak board and a weak chief executive, Sir Alex is still hugely influential: he could make things very tricky for whoever comes in.

When Solskjaer — for whom anyone with a heart must feel a twinge of sympathy — left at the end, after the most famous away win since Agincourt, his eyes raked over the stands as if bidding a sad farewell.

But once elite defenders start running into each other, as Maguire and Shaw did to set up another Liverpool goal, then the coaching set-up should be torn asunder. However commendable the United hierarchy’s apparent desire to stand by one of their own — well two or three of their own, in fact, as most of the coaching staff are old boys whose skills may not have stood up so well in a more searching environment at say, Chelsea or the Etihad — Solskjaer’s departure can be only a matter of time. But what have Guardiola, Tuchel, Klopp got that Ole hasn’t? Well it’s certainly not money. Instead it boils down to one essential commodity: steel. Solskjaer is just nor ruthless enough with himself, his players or his staff, and the dressing room is clearly hopelessly divided.