United malaise comes from the top and Amorim faces a battle to fix it

A year on from Ratcliffe's arrival at Old Trafford there are very few signs the club is moving in the right direction

- Jonathan Wilson

Covering Manchester United these days feels a little like being a character in Silent Witness: every week you end up writing a postmortem. The Sunday defeat at Tottenham was an engaging if scrappy affair that finished 1-0 largely because the poor quality of defending on show was compensated for by the low level of attacking. It was fun in its way, but it didn't feel a lot like Premier League football.

It also meant United dropped to 15th in the table, having won just four of 14 league games under Ruben Amorim. With Erik ten Hag at the helm this season, United were taking 1.22 points per game; on Amorim's watch that's down to 1.00. Nobody was under any illusions about the scale of the task he was taking on, but four months after Amorim accepted the job it would be very difficult to identify concrete signs of progress.