Troubled Ole flying into eye of a storm United gaffer in a nosedive as Foxes run riot
This was not a sackable result because Leicester are a really good team on their day – but make no mistake, this was a sackable performance.
And if its type is repeated any time soon, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer knows what will be coming.
For some reason his United players made the 100-mile trip to Leicester by plane – the boss should’ve made them walk home.
He said: “The performance was not good enough.
“We have had too many games where we have lost points so we need to look at the whole set-up of the team and maybe something has to give.
“Every point in the Premier League you have to fight for and in key moments we just didn’t do that enough.”
To produce a display as scruffy and as error-strewn as this one takes some doing but, despite the vast array of talent, the men from Manchester managed it with truly incompetent ease.
And we all know the buck stops with the manager, which, in a way, is a shame because he is a thoroughly decent character.
And it should be noted United had gone a hugely impressive 29 Premier League away games unbeaten ahead of this thumping.
You could say then Solskjaer was due a bad one on the road and that is why his position is not – and should not be – under immediate threat.
But two home matches, against Atalanta and Liverpool, could well decide Solskjaer’s future.
He cannot afford to lose both but a rerun of this sort of outing will give them no chance in both fixtures. United, almost to a man, were startlingly abysmal.
But they’d made a dream start as Mason Greenwood fired them into a 19th-minute lead when he unleashed a thunderbolt from 20 yards that flew into the far corner as it shaved the inside of the post.
But the visitors were punished for sloppy passing in the danger zone in the 31st minute.
Kelechi Iheanacho robbed Harry Maguire and squared the ball for Youri Tielemans to hit the top corner with a looping shot over keeper David de Gea.
A tame second half came to life with De Gea tipping a sublime Tielemans ball on to the woodwork before Cristiano Ronaldo – who spurned a first-half chance – saw home keeper Kasper Schmeichel palm over his shot from just inside the area. It was rip-roaring action from there on. Caglar Soyuncu turned the tide with a close-range effort in the 78th minute before Marcus Rashford, returning af ter shoulder surgery, levelled for United with eight minutes left.
Less than 60 seconds later, however, Foxes substitute Ayoze Perez chipped the ball into Jamie Vardy’s path and the striker gave De Gea no chance with a superb volley with the outside of his foot.
Another home sub, Patson Daka, put the icing on the cake for Leicester in stoppage time as more poor defending gave the Zambian striker time and space to tap the ball in from point-blank range at the far post.
Goal hero Vardy said: “The most important thing for us was the performance because we had let our standards slip recently but we had the international break to reflect on things.”