SCHOLESY WAS RIGHT, HE SAW THIS COMING

PAUL SCHOLES sat next to me in the BT Sport studio on Wednesday night. It was a difficult assignment for any pundit and even more so for a Manchester United legend. United’s comeback against Atalanta was rousing. One of those big, special nights at Old Trafford. For both of us, it would have been easy to focus on the positives. Paul didn’t want to be the doom-and-gloom merchant after a great Champions League win, but he called yesterday’s dismantling. He has to give an honest opinion on what unfolds. He said if they played like that against Liverpool, they’d be on the end of a hiding and look what happened. There had been all the euphoria, Cristiano Ronaldo’s late winner again, but you have to see the bigger picture. Paul did just that. There were a lot of people commenting on how miserable he was, but Paul was proved absolutely correct. Atalanta are decent, but we both said United would come undone if they replicated that performance. It was almost not nice being proved right. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer is clearly a good man. But he has a terrific squad and they are totally outperformed by sides who play as a team. You cannot be shipping five goals at Old

Trafford and Solskjaer has been in charge of two afternoons like that in the space of a year. The unrest around that club — you all saw the thousands streaming out of Old Trafford yesterday — is relatively simple. They have top individual players but are less than the sum of their parts. United have been too individualistic for too long. They’ve been getting away with it because the likes of Ronaldo, Bruno Fernandes and Marcus Rashford can all do something special. Have they got a top manager? Is he at the same level as Tuchel, Guardiola or Klopp? I think any of those managers make sure this team goes deep into a title race. Ole must have known that there was loads to work on from Wednesday night. Locating the negative aspects of a win is the only way you can improve. You cannot wait until you lose two or three games, because you won’t be in a job anymore. There were individuals errors yesterday — Luke Shaw and Harry Maguire coming together for one of the goals — and defending like that is not the manager’s fault. But who didn’t smell this sort of result coming? Gary Neville was right yesterday: the fixtures so far this season haven’t been difficult. This was the tough one and they lost 5-0.