“Three or four days are not going to change a whole lot,” Ole Gunnar Solskjaer said as the Manchester United manager looked ahead to the visit of Tottenham Hotspur on Wednesday night, and Saturday’s trip to champions Manchester City. Perhaps Solskjaer genuinely believes that but, just as two unexpected wins would provide a most timely shot in the arm, so a couple of defeats would further intensify the scrutiny on his future, and doubtless harden the clamour in some circles for Mauricio Pochettino to take over.

It was Jose Mourinho, the man he replaced at United and with whom he will come face to face on the Old Trafford touchline this week, who poked fun last month at Solskjaer’s habit of talking repeatedly about “the future”. That was probably no surprise coming from someone who has always prioritised the here and now over the long-term and whose Old Trafford reign will look better the longer United labour under Solskjaer.

What United need is some balance between those two outlooks but, the more Solskjaer talks, the more he sounds like a more distant predecessor at United, David Moyes, who was lulled into thinking he had six years in which to rebuild the club only to be ditched after 10 months.