IAN LADYMAN: Manchester United are shamefully poor… and Liverpool STILL can't beat them
The last action of another remarkable game between English football’s fiercest rivals was a shot from Liverpool’s Harvey Elliott that was saved by Manchester United goalkeeper Andre Onana.
Two minutes earlier, Elliott’s team-mate Luis Diaz had half-volleyed over from seven yards. They were shots No 27 and 28 of Liverpool’s afternoon and No 86 and 87 of the total that Jurgen Klopp’s team have racked up over three games against United in all competitions this season.
Those numbers speak of domination and accurately so. Yet Liverpool have won none of those three games and the impact on Klopp’s final season may yet be more profound than he would dare admit at this stage.
Klopp was in shoulder-shrugging mode after this one. These things happen. You can’t win them all. A point at Old Trafford is never a bad result. And so on and so forth.
But this is arguably the worst United team of the 11 dreadful seasons that have followed Sir Alex Ferguson’s final Premier League title triumph in 2013.
Erik ten Hag’s version are a weak, passive, fearful bunch. At times during this game they were so bad, so utterly incapable of playing any kind of intelligent and progressive football, that it was hard to believe what we were watching.
Much of the last decade has been regressive, but a team that ends a half of football at home to Liverpool having failed to take a shot, while the opposition have had 15 (that’s one every three minutes), is in danger of taking this great football team to depths previously unvisited even by the likes of David Moyes, Louis van Gaal, Jose Mourinho and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.
Yet Liverpool could not beat them. In fact they came perilously close to losing to them once again. Liverpool experienced a kind of weird paralysis
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