Ken Early: Liverpool have become awfully comfortable with losing under Arne Slot

Arne Slot’s first visit to Old Trafford was only 18 months ago, but already seems to belong to a different era of football. Luis Diaz and Mohamed Salah tore Erik ten Hag’s frail side to pieces that day in a 3-0 win for Liverpool, and afterwards Slot was happy to give a televised postmatch clinic on just how he’d done it.

So much has changed for both these sides. Diaz was one of those deemed dispensable by Liverpool’s brains trust in the summer and he tears teams to pieces for Bayern Munich now. Salah, who has the best record against Manchester United of any Liverpool player in history but was denied a last chance to improve the record by injury, has become alienated under Slot, and leaves the club in a couple of weeks, along with Andy Robertson.

As for Slot, it’s been a long time since he’s been able to explain a famous victory. These days, he is usually to be heard justifying failure.

United, meanwhile, packed the entire Ruben Amorim era in between Slot’s two visits to their home ground. Now, under Michael Carrick, they are the most improved team in the league compared with last season, have picked up more points than any other side since Carrick took over, and, with Sunday’s 3-2 victory, have assured their return to the Champions League.

Is Carrick therefore a done deal? Those in United’s decision-making structure who still think there could be options out there better than Carrick will have had much food for thought from this game. It was not the first match under Carrick in which the team started strongly then lost their way. It was the same against Brentford last week. Against Leeds it was the same minus the strong start.

These periods of drift will have them wondering if the team deserves a more experienced coach – someone such as Andoni Iraola or Julian Nagelsmann. But are these other options really so attractive as to be worth disposing of Carrick now – a decision that would be seen by many fans as a betrayal, after he has delivered everything the club had hoped for from his time in charge?

These decision-makers will be feeling more confident than they have for a while because last summer, for the first time in years, United’s transfer business actually worked out well. Senne Lammens, Matheus Cunha, Benjamin Sesko and Bryan Mbeumo have all improved the first XI. (If Arsenal had signed Sesko instead of Viktor Gyökeres, they might have already wrapped up the league by now.) It was also fortunate they failed to sell Bruno Fernandes to the Saudi league.

The most important task this summer is to sign a convincing replacement for Casemiro and two quality full backs. If they get these players, then it will not matter so much whether the manager is Carrick or someone else. The team will be better – and they are already third.

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Liverpool continue to insist Slot will still be their head coach next season. They seem keen not to be perceived as the kind of knee-jerk operators who sack managers on the basis of one bad game, or even one bad season.

Apparently, they would rather be perceived as absentee landlords who aren’t too worried about what goes on at their club as long as the Champions League money keeps coming.

The scoreline makes it sound like a respectable defeat for Liverpool – an opinion that might reasonably be shared by people who had followed the game on Ceefax. This was another bad beating for a team that has become awfully comfortable with losing.

Slot pointed out that United’s second goal was a handball by Sesko, and it was. That clearly wrong decision was typical of the dreadful standard of Premier League refereeing to which we have all become resigned. “We all know this season what the outcome for Liverpool is,” Slot said, in the tone of defeatist fatalism he increasingly adopts.

But maybe this was a better outcome for Liverpool than the alternative outcome of the goal being disallowed, and the referees instead awarding a penalty to United and a red card to Curtis Jones, who had seemed to drag Sesko back as he prepared to shoot in an earlier phase of play.

More than the handball, Slot was annoyed with Alexis Mac Allister for giving the ball away deep in the United half in the lead-up to the goal. The Argentinian midfielder was involved in all three United goals: turning his back on a shot and deflecting it past his own goalkeeper for the first, and teeing up the third for Kobbie Mainoo with a shanked clearance.

Mac Allister, who was in the 2025 Premier League Team of the Season, has been possibly the biggest underperformer at the club this year amid a host of strong candidates. Yet the thing that stood out for Slot on Sunday was that he had taken what the coach deemed an unnecessary risk. “You have to know where to lose a ball,” Slot said.

Slot would presumably prefer his players to endlessly pass the ball to each other in the middle of the field, since this is what Liverpool mostly seem to be trying to do, as though football was a game where you scored points by holding on to the ball around the centre circle.

Liverpool’s attacking play looks extremely retro right now, maybe 10 years out of date, a decadent take on Rodgers-era Death By Football, endless short passes around the edges of the opposing defence at a tempo that guarantees nobody ever gets the time or space to take a shot.

Slot said he had warned his players about United’s threat on the counter, yet his team played in such a way as to get counter-attacked constantly in the first half. The game should have been over as a contest by half-time, and indeed it appeared to be.

Liverpool did not “come back” early in the second half, so much as get frogmarched back into the game by United’s mistakes. First, Amad Diallo and then Lammens tried to play passes that were never on to present Liverpool with unexpected chances to score.

At that point, with Old Trafford dumbstruck and Carrick’s team clearly panicking, a Liverpool win looked the more likely outcome. It would be unfair to say Liverpool wilted. They simply continued playing the same way they had been all game. The only scoring chance they created that was not directly laid on by United errors came from a Dominik Szoboszlai set-piece. From open play, absolutely nothing.

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