Liverpool and Slot a contrast to United and systems-obsessive Amorim

To date Ruben Amorim has achieved the genuinely startling feat of making this United team worse in almost every area, a rare case of anti-bounce

Liverpool boss Arne Slot and his Manchester United counterpart Ruben Amorim, who face off in the Premier League at Anfield on Sunday

Welcome to the meat grinder. Amorim has gone almost overnight from notions of perfectibility, systems, control, six-month unbeaten runs, to looking like a catalogue knitwear model having an existential crisis, bowed under the weight of all that scar tissue, the ghosts in the eaves, the voices through the wall.

And so, on to Anfield then. The real problem for Manchester United before Sunday’s trip to face the league leaders isn’t the run of four straight defeats with no goals scored in the past three. It isn’t the fact their recent results against these opponents include 3-0, 7-0, 4-0, and 5-0 defeats. It isn’t the prospect of pretty much every part of this ghost ship beginning to rattle and squeak on its hinges, from tearful new additions to faded celebrity time-servers.