More than 20 minutes remained when Jose Mourinho decided he had seen enough of Paul Pogba going through the motions again after another masterclass in indifference and dragged off the France midfielder.

The baton was handed to Alexis Sanchez but, predictably, the Chilean proceeded to drop it, too. Sanchez had only been on the pitch a few minutes when Manchester United broke on the counter-attack after excellent work from Marcus Rashford. Sanchez picked up the ball but, with Anthony Martial striding down the left, United’s latest expensive misfit managed to hit a simple pass behind his team-mate and out for a throw-in as the move broke down to widespread Old Trafford groans.

Welcome to the modern-day United, a stuttering, labouring, plodding monument to mediocrity assembled at exorbitant cost. Mourinho has claimed United will be in or around the top four by the end of the year but, watching this and so much of the dross they have served up this season, that seems fanciful at best.

If anything, you have to wonder how much further they have to fall, and they will certainly need to be better than this to see off Young Boys in the Champions League on Tuesday. This is United’s worst start to a campaign for 28 years and, by the final whistle here, those groans had turned into boos.

It was probably a good job for Mourinho and his players that Crystal Palace cannot shoot. United could not either and, in reality, these two teams – both of whom had goals correctly ruled offside – could have played long into the night and still not found the net. But at least Roy Hodgson’s side were enterprising, at least they looked like a unit, a team with a plan.