Man United won't be fixed by Mauricio Pochettino or Erik ten Hag - and Gary Neville has shown why

Sobering. Torn to shreds. As bad as it gets.

These were all ways in which Gary Neville described a Manchester United performance after seeing them slump to a dismal defeat to one of their biggest rivals. But this wasn’t after Sunday’s derby day defeat at the hands of Manchester City – this was nearly five months ago now.

Sky Sports could have saved a lot of money at the weekend by simply re-running Neville’s comments following the 5-0 defeat to Liverpool at Old Trafford. Just take out all of the mentions of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and virtually every word of his analysis that day in October would summarise United’s capitulation at the Etihad.

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"It's been coming for five, six weeks," Neville said after that defeat to Liverpool. "This is what Manchester United's performance levels have been like all season.

"As soon as they've come up against a good team, they've been torn to shreds and it's told them exactly where they are at. This is as bad as it gets. It's the nature of the performance. They have capitulated. They've lost everything today - discipline, organisation.”

It seemed easy to pin the result that day – and the subsequent defeats that led to Solskjaer’s sacking – on the manager. He was out of his depth and had been for some time, that was clear for everybody to see. What Sunday’s result at the Etihad demonstrated was that it wasn’t the only issue.

Ralf Rangnick’s appointment was supposed to have settled things down at Old Trafford, and to some extent it had. Results had generally improved, even if performances hadn’t. But Sunday made it abundantly clear that United are woefully short of challenging City and Liverpool for the Premier