Maguire’s annus horribilis goes on as Manchester United collapse at Sevilla

M anchester City (6-2 away), Liverpool (7-0 away) and now 3-0 at Sevilla: the Spanish side join the roll call of those this season to embarrass Erik ten Hag’s Manchester United seriously in a high-stakes game.

José Luis Mendilibar’s team stand 13th in La Liga but were handed the initiative early on by the hapless Harry Maguire, whose annus horribilis may have reached a nadir in Andalucía. Eight minutes in and the captain’s darkest nightmare became true, unwanted real life. What unfolded seemed to begin in agonising slow-motion before speeding up to compound the pain. It was the kind of error that has made the 30-year-old a reject for Ten Hag: close to his area Maguire, perhaps arrogantly, demanded the ball from David de Gea, then regretted it immediately as on receiving it near-panic set in.

Suddenly Erik Lamela, Lucas Ocampos and Youssef En-Nesyri were a three-man pincer movement squeezing Maguire, whose attempted out-ball to Aaron Wan-Bissaka was closed off. In ran En-Nesyri, who collected the rebound that pinged off Lamela and Maguire was left a witness to the mess he had engineered, the expression all too familiar from a footballer who has become, cruelly or not, a byword for defensive calamity.

Students of body language might have earlier spied pensiveness in Maguire’s demeanour during the pre-game lineup as he contemplated an opportunity to shine in the injury-enforced absences of Raphaël Varane and Lisandro Martínez. Victor Lindelöf was offered the same chance, too, as the other replacement. The Englishman and the Swede were paired in central defence here for only a sixth time under Ten Hag, for whom a favoured trope is that “in top football you must be ready”. This Europa League quarter-final second leg, the