In 50 years of following Manchester United, I have experienced nothing as dispiriting as the final 20 minutes of Wednesday night’s defeat to Burnley. Watching them as a schoolboy sink into the second division, spending my student grant observing them stumble through the Dave Sexton years, seeing those stodgy early days of Alex Ferguson: nothing compares to how utterly useless they were on Wednesday. But this was not a one-off, a bad day at the office. This was hard evidence of accelerating ineptitude.

When the line up was announced before kick off my son texted me to say it was as bad a United team as he had ever seen. He was right. And it transpired they were even worse on grass than they were on paper. A centre forward plagued by an apparent phobia of straying into the opponent’s penalty area, in midfield the only two Brazilians who can’t pass a football and at the back a defender whose principal contribution across nine years of United duty is to keep the internet supplied with memes of comedy pratfalls: they were every bit as hapless as expected.

And on the touchline was the manager, an unquestionable United hero, responsible for the most glorious few seconds in the club’s history, but now making a rabbit caught in the full beam of an advancing lorry's headlights look a model of strategic thinking.