United players are good enough. The problem is the man leading them

IF Pep Guardiola were to manage Manchester City, Tottenham, Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United for the next two seasons, then City would win both titles because their squad has been built.

But United would finish second in at least one of those campaigns and maybe even the other as well.

People were quick to pile into their players following the 3-1 defeat by Liverpool on Sunday, with the general consensus that their players just aren’t good enough.

I look at the players on United’s books, though, and I see one of the biggest and most technically diverse squads in the Premier League.

They could switch from pure football to physicality to long ball, you name it, and they have all the ingredients there to build around and do whatever they want to do.

So, it’s not that they aren’t good enough, it’s just that they’re out of form because of the man who is leading them.

He set them up to defend their own half and counterattack in the biggest game of the season against their biggest rivals, but they didn’t have the players on the pitch to do that job. And I’m certain that if Jose Mourinho had been in charge of Liverpool and Jurgen Klopp in charge of United, we’d have seen the same game in reverse.

Namely, United taking the game to a defensive Liverpool side, who were sitting back and hoping to catch them on the break.

The one thing I could pretty much guarantee you if United were to change managers is that, a year from now, we’d be talking about Paul Pogba as a potential winner of the Ballon d’or, Romelu Lukaku being on course for 25-plus goals and Jesse Lingard staking a claim to be England’s player of the year.

But the problem in the here and now is that the rot has set in so much that Mourinho cannot put any faith in his mercurial players.

He is having to fall back on characters such as Chris Smalling and Marouane Fellaini because he knows he can rely on them.

Smalling is a cracking pro who, in a great United team, would plug the gaps in the Premier League now and again. Yet on Sunday, before he got injured in the warm-up, Mourinho was asking him to be so much more than that. Don’t get me wrong, United could do with Virgil van Dijk over Smalling but, if you compare their squad with Liverpool’s, you’re only talking minor tweaks and not major surgery being required.

There looks to be an element of the famous red shirt weighing too heavily and what United need is for someone to come in and enable fun and enjoyment, while getting over the message of hard work, discipline and expression.

That way, they would flourish, but it just cannot happen with this manager.

What they need is someone who can get in their heads because the talent, technical ability and squad depth are all there.

If you play well for United and enjoy it the shirt will be light as a feather — in fact the only people it will weigh heavily on are those playing against it.

ARSENAL’S defeat by Southampton showed there is still that little glitch in the system.But they are making progress and, as we saw with Liverpool when Jurgen Klopp first came in, it won’t be for another six months, nine months, maybe even a year that we really see Unai Emery’s philosophy settling in.I still can’t see Arsenal being consistent enough or not glitch-free enough to guarantee a top-four spot this season but things are on the up nonetheless.