Raging captain Bruno Fernandes’s standout shocker in United nightmare

As Liverpool’s players celebrated scoring their seventh goal without reply last night, an overenthused and possibly refreshed pitch-invader sprinted across the Anfield turf to join the gleeful throng, only to slip and take out Andy Robertson with an accidental two-footed lunge. With just two minutes of normal time remaining, it was closer than anyone in a Manchester United shirt had got to the Liverpool full-back at any point during the game. While United winger Antony has since been singled out for his almost heroic lack of enthusiasm when it came to keeping tabs on the Scotsman, there was plenty of blame to go round for Manchester United’s worst defeat since 1931.

While the team as a whole had a comical collective second-half nightmare in the face of a Liverpool onslaught reminiscent of a year ago when they were still good, Antony, Fred, Casemiro, Lisandro Martínez and Luke Shaw were all conspicuously awful, but the standout shocker was that of Bruno Fernandes. When he wasn’t busy losing the ball, United’s on-field captain was waving his arms like an orchestra conductor on amphetamines, raging at his own, the referee’s and everyone else’s ineptitude. In a show of petulance that would see most toddlers receive a lengthy ban from their local indoor soft play, the Portuguese midfielder also shoved a fourth official, threw himself to the ground feigning injury, took a dive in an effort to win a penalty and remonstrated with his own manager for not substituting him, all the better to leave him to endure a humiliation that was largely of his own making.

Today, presumably with United’s social media team having studied the infamous, widely derided “fan sentiment graphs”, the apologies duly started popping up on various Social