Manchester United lost to a club with a better plan and Ineos have to make up for lost time

There might come a time this season when Manchester United's miserable 2023/24 Premier League season will be consigned to history. We'll stop talking about it, stop using it as a tool for comparison. It suddenly won't feel all that relevant.

For now, with the second stage of the Erik ten Hag era still in its infancy, it's going to condition how we view this team. It's the prism through which United are being judged early in the campaign.

And if the judgements on the opening weekend were encouraging, this was more of a concern. It wasn't quite the collapse we associated United with so often last season. For a lot of the afternoon, they were harder to play against, more structured and more controlled. But they can't kick the addiction to chaos.

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United conceded a soft opener in a dull first half and when the game opened up after the break they rode their luck before a 95th-minute winner that felt like it should have been gift-wrapped. Failing to clear a corner and then forgetting to defend half the penalty area during the second phase felt eerily familiar. It came at a time when Brighton's pressure had been building.

So a point that would have felt like it added belief to Ten Hag's new side vanished and the familiar questions returned. This team do look better, but are the improvements enough? They have got better as a pressing team and are more compact, but they aren't creating enough chances and are making defensive errors. It puts plenty of pressure on the Old Trafford game with Liverpool next week.

Ten Hag's side actually won here in May but that felt like an anomaly. Brighton had won four of their last five Premier League