Manchester United Show Why the Rest of the Season Will Likely Be a Bust

Manchester United's performance against Liverpool in the UEFA Europa League on Thursday evening was barely a surprise. It was, however, shocking—in the colloquial sense of the word as a synonym for terrible.

Louis van Gaal got his initial tactics for the 2-0 defeat badly wrong and compounded his mistake by adapting to the 3-5-2 approach that has almost never been effective during his time at United.

In the first instance, he brought Marouane Fellaini back into midfield to partner Morgan Schneiderlin. This almost entirely surrendered the impetus to Liverpool in the first half and meant there was an insufficient link between the defence and the pacey and potentially incisive front three—Memphis Depay, Marcus Rashford and Anthony Martial—he had assembled.

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Never has a statistic more aptly told the tale of a performance than Fellaini's first-half pass-completion percentage. He attempted just 14 passes and competed only eight of them. It was a feeble performance with the ball, the kind that invited plenty of pressure onto his side.

He was not alone in underperforming. Daley Blind was once again wasteful with possession. So too was Juan Mata. They gave the ball away 36 and 33 per cent of the time they attempted a pass in the first half as United looked a disjointed mess.

Of course, United looking a disjointed mess with Fellaini in the middle of the park is nothing new. Back in January, I wrote, "Van Gaal should stop turning to the Belgian when looking for a midfield solution because, sadly, doing so makes the situation worse." 

At half-time, television pictures showed Michael Carrick warming up on the pitch. It seemed safe to assume Van Gaal was replacing Fellaini with him. Perhaps not the worst idea, although the invention Ander Herrera offered was lacking and Carrick has not exactly been in form lately.

But as it transpired, the United manager was replacing Rashford with Carrick and radically altering his system. Rashford's selection was a brave one, especially given how much defensive work was required of the youngster. Taking him off, especially after he had been booked, was not a terrible idea.

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What was a terrible idea, though, was switching to three at the back with Carrick at the heart of the defence. Carrick is no centre-back, as he has so often shown. Even against FC Midtjylland at home in February, he made an error that led to their goal.

He repeated the trick here, gifting possession to Liverpool in the build up to their second, leaving the rest of his defensive colleagues hopelessly at sea. Van Gaal's rationale is almost impossible to understand.

He switched to a system that has been definitively unsuccessful during his time in charge of the Red Devils—a system that threatened to derail the whole season last time out—and put a player at the heart of it who was entirely unsuited to being there.

In truth, there was a brief improvement after half-time. Between the 50th and 60th minutes, United enjoyed 61 per cent of the possession, their only sustained spell of possession in the game. They were not able to convert that into much in the way of chances, however. That good spell soon faded, and by the end of the match, Liverpool had taken 13 shots to United's five, a figure that reflected their dominance—they had the ball for 59.7 per cent of the time.

As an isolated performance, it could be written off as a bad day at the office, but nearly two seasons into Van Gaal's United tenure, it is much closer to being the norm than the exception.

In February, I wrote that Chelsea's late equaliser against United at Stamford Bridge exposed "a frailty in United's makeup that will surely rear its head again before the end of the campaign." It reared its head again on Thursday. Sadly, for those banking on an FA Cup win or an unlikely run at fourth place in the Premier League, it seems impossible to imagine this will be the last time.

United are crawling to what most fans likely hope will be the end of Van Gaal's reign, hoping any damage done between now and the end of the season is not too serious. There is little joy to be had in that period, barring an FA Cup run that would be distinctly uncharacteristic. The season seems likely to be a bust from here on out.

Advanced statistics courtesy of WhoScored.com.