Crystal Palace score four and humble Manchester (dis)united
For Manchester United, a crumbling team led by a sinking manager, this was a night that provided so many snapshots of chaos that, by the end, it was hard to keep track of them all. Where do you even start? Perhaps with the Crystal Palace goals, all four of them, or the sight of Erik ten Hag standing helplessly on the touchline as they flew in?
Or you could look at the players, dishevelled and disinterested, and the individual moments which demonstrated how badly they were beaten here. The image of Casemiro flat out on the floor, for example, as younger and stronger men ran away from him. Or Antony screaming at a team-mate in a fruitless attempt to deflect from his own errors.
So many small moments of ineptitude, all adding up to paint a wider picture as United’s bad season threatens to become a genuinely disastrous one. The Premier League table now has them in eighth, out of reach of the European places and with little hope that anything might change for the better in the remaining weeks of this campaign. This was their 13th loss of the campaign, a club record.
Ten Hag must know that his hopes of remaining in his job are vanishing, if not already vanished. And that is assuming he even wants to remain.
Few would blame him for feeling otherwise, especially amid suggestions in the German press that Bayern Munich are interested.
This shell of a United team are now in genuine danger of missing out on European football. That would be a terrible outcome for ten Hag on a personal level, and also for United as a club. No one was watching this collapse at Palace and thinking of the balance sheet but it could ultimately hit them there, too.
It says so much about the current United that Palace were regarded by many as the favourites before this game, and that they went out and played like it. It was Oliver Glasner’s Palace, not United, who played the big-team football, exchanging passes and flicks and attacking at every opportunity, with the brilliant Michael Olise leading the way.