There is plenty of blame to go around for Manchester United’s derby defeat

While The Fiver hasn’t seen them, we’re ready to guess that the fabled “fan sentiment graphs” Manchester United’s media flunkies are tasked with compiling didn’t make for particularly pleasant viewing on Monday morning. Before Christmas, the club’s senior media wonk Phil Lynch found himself the subject of some ridicule for appearing on one of those new-fangled “podcast” things to explain just how much behind-the-scenes work goes into the composition of yet another pointless, unnecessary and poorly received Harry Maguire apology on assorted Social Media Disgraces.

Almost 24 hours after Manchester United had their backsides spanked at Manchester City, Maguire has yet to pipe up on the state of affairs. Perhaps he and his teammates have risen up in rebellion against Lynch by changing their passwords, or the American has finally realised the utter futility of trying “to manage the social media [disgrace] narrative” of a club captain whose performance was so calamitous that City might have won by far less if he’d been shown the red card he deserved for a foul shortly after an hour. Which is not to pick on Maguire, even if it is like stealing the pennies from a dead man’s eyes these days. There was plenty of blame to go around for Manchester United’s defeat: questionable tactics by their interim manager, the excellence of their hosts and an air of second-half lethargy that even seemed to extend to the subs’ bench, unless Jesse Lingard and Marcus Rashford were specifically instructed not to make the rest of their teammates look worse by having anything resembling an impact when they came on.

While the official United line was that Cristiano Ronaldo had sat this one out in Portugal with hip-knack, pre-match rumours suggested the