Manchester United are going so far backwards they forgot about Jose Mourinho's matchwinning tactic

The route to watch Manchester United's open training at Carrington now consists of a five-minute walk past huts that house the groundstaff's equipment on terrain that could be mistaken for farmland.

This is in keeping with the image the Glazer family have cultivated at United: they do not care that this is the United the wider world can see. "We're Man United, we'll do what we want," as the chant goes. No wonder they have been left behind.

It is a path nobody at Carrington takes and the security chap was baffled by the long-way-round route. It is so distant from the main building that the nearby bushes would have provided suitable cover for Marcelo Bielsa's spy.

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Some of the visiting Turkish journalists were appalled. Having navigated Manchester Airport, they did not expect to end up in an episode of Clarkson's Farm. The squalid stench on Monday is one usually smelt at a filthy farm.

Those of us who made that walk are not as knee-deep in the s--t as United are. The defeat to Galatasaray was an embarrassment on the pitch and in the stands as thousands of Turkish fans congregated in pockets of the home section.

"Gifted my ticket to the foundation, United sold it on at the ticket office. Guess who was sat in my seat? A Galatasaray fan," a United fan tweeted last night.

Those of us in the press box were surrounded by away followers. The section of the directors' box reserved for guests doubled as an ultras unit for the Galatasaray dignitaries and their analysts in the press box were as partisan as those in the away section to our right.

A number of United staff members looked sheepish. Matt