There were 16 days between Manchester United’s Premier League games against Norwich and Newcastle, but you wouldn’t have known it watching their performance at St James’ Park on Monday.
Those days were not as straightforward as Ralf Rangnick would have hoped for, with the club's training ground shut down due to a Covid outbreak, but they should still have been valuable to United’s interim coach.
The early days of Rangnick’s spell in charge were mitigated by the fact he had not had much time to implement his ideas. That excuse no longer cuts it.
United were playing a side in 19th place, with one league win all season, who have conceded 80 Premier League goals in 2021 – the most in a calendar year in the competition’s history.
And yet they were still abject. They were disjointed, disorganised and displayed terrible body language.
The difficulties caused by the Omicron variant have made the business of top-flight football a real challenge, but Rangnick could not have been given easier fixtures.
With Norwich and Newcastle in the rear-view mirror and Burnley on the horizon, United will have played all of the current bottom three in succession.
They should be embarrassed by their recent performances – and Newcastle was arguably the worst of the lot.
One particularly alarming statistic neatly sums up their woes: United lost possession a whopping 167 times at St James’ Park.
Unsurprisingly, that is their worst performance in possession in the Premier League this season. Newcastle pressed with vigor and belief for most of the game, but injuries to star forwards Allan Saint-Maximin and Callum Wilson hampered their efforts.
Rangnick made a double change at half-time, bringing on Jadon Sancho and Edinson Cavani for Mason Greenwood and Fred.
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While Cavani scored the all-important equaliser from a fortuitous rebound, and they were marginally improved on the ball, it was still an unacceptable performance.
The players looked at odds with each other, with the much-discussed 4-2-2-2 formation not helping things.
Rangnick shifted things around in the second half, but ultimately the team’s lack of any discernible quality on the ball undermined the whole operation. Like every fan watching on, Rangnick is well aware of the issue.
“Our biggest problem was the mistakes we made, the giveaways, the unforced errors when we were in possession of the ball, we just had too many balls that we gave away,” he said post-match.
“Even in the second half, when we scored the equaliser and they had two or three injured players, we were not really controlling the game and taking the wrong decisions in the important moments and that’s what it’s all about."
He added: “We’ve been trying to get better at controlling games. Today, we didn't control the game apart from a few moments.”
Talk of short-term fixes is always rife in Premier League football, particularly around clubs the size of United and particularly around transfer windows.
It is true that United could do with a defensively-minded midfielder, with Fred and Scott McTominay having one of their all-time worst games against Newcastle.
But the underlying truth is that there is no quick fix for the problems dogging United. There is no miracle cure out there on the transfer market. Rangnick cannot turn things around with a few passion-filled training sessions.
This is on the players. They would be well advised to cut out the hand-on-hips moaning which is blighting their games, because we are only halfway through what promises to be a long season at Old Trafford.
