Manchester United lack leadership and transfer PR fixes won't change that

Tottenham’s 6-1 win caps a miserable decline and Solskjær’s pat on the head from Mourinho reflects manager’s lack of authority

By the time the final whistle blew at Villa Park on Sunday evening, the temptation was to laugh and shrug and write off the previous nine hours as just one of those days. Freakishness can breed freakishness, as though the forces of chaos, once out of the cage, can be very hard to recapture. Manchester United had been hammered at home! By Tottenham! Liverpool had been battered away! West Ham had won a second game in a row! The temptation perhaps was to repeat the lie that in the Premier League anybody can beat anybody on their day. Or, more realistically, consideration was perhaps given to the extent to which the breakdown of order this autumn has been caused by fatigue, a lack of preparation time and the absence of fans.

But United’s defeat was not like Liverpool’s. It’s true the riskiness of Liverpool’s approach has been highlighted recently and that, whether you regard that as sloppiness or a necessary gamble, a defensive collapse, even if not quite of that magnitude, didn’t come totally without warning. But still, the 7-2 defeat at Aston Villa was a genuine shock and there is the (tenuous) mitigation that they were without their captain, the forward who leads their press and their first-choice goalkeeper.

Related: Transfer deadline day 2020: Cavani, Partey, Sancho and more news - live!

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