Manchester United need Ten Hag to switch off the soap opera before the first adverts

There was nothing positive for Manchester United to take from Anfield, but Erik ten Hag can’t afford to dwell upon it when he needs an immediate reaction.

Amid the ‘Erik seven Hag’ memes already doing the rounds, there will be few consolations that the Manchester United manager can take from the absolute humping afforded to his team by Liverpool on Sunday afternoon. This wasn’t just bad. This was historically bad. This was literally as bad as it had ever been in the entire history of the club. And it came from absolutely out of the blue.

On a player-by-player level, it felt like they had all reverted to the worst imaginable caricatures of themselves, from Bruno Fernandes starting a stream of arguments with himself and anyone within earshot in one of the most un-captain-like performances in the history of the club to Antony ‘playing’ in the loosest sense of the word, when he might have been better described as being ‘more-or-less present on the pitch’.

We can draw the lens back further and further, but the view gets no prettier. This was Manchester United’s worst defeat since Boxing Day 1931, when they were beaten by the same scoreline at Molineux by Wolves. It was their heaviest ever defeat to Liverpool, surpassing the 7-1 defeat inflicted upon Newton Heath in the clubs’ first ever competitive meeting in October 1895.

At every level, it was unexpected. It’s reasonable to say that Manchester United have had spells recently when they weren’t completely fluid. For an hour at Old Trafford against both Leeds United and West Ham United, they coughed and spluttered before finally coming to life. But these spells were nothing like severe-looking enough to feel like foreshocks for this particular result.

And it wasn’t just a matter of form in the build-up to the game, either. Even after 40 minutes had passed, United had shaded the better of the opportunities, with little sign of what was to come. This sudden volte-face level of tumult is pretty much unprecedented at any club in the recent history of the game.

One of the more notable things about Manchester United over the course of the run which got them back to third place in the Premier League had been their assuredness. The swagger was returning, and for it to vanish so quickly, and just as Liverpool were suddenly winding back to their 2021 version, almost felt like an act of illusion, as though Kenny Dalglish had been granted a birthday wish from a genie rather than a cup of…