Wide-eyed, furious, blue nylon sports coat tossed by the to-and-fro-conflicting winds of the Georgios Karaiskakis Stadium: the similarities between David Moyes’s recent appearances on the touchline and a particularly harrowing modern-day production of King Lear have never been quite so pronounced as during the abject 2-0 Champions League defeat by Olympiakos. To date, Moyes might have been able to draw a little comfort from Lear’s own note of jaded positivity: the worst is not, So long as we can say “This is the worst”.

Well, even that’s gone out the window now. This was the worst. Not just the most depressing performance to date of a careworn season, but perhaps even United’s worst performance in the Champions League, a night when a team containing eight players who have been to the final of this competition looked not just second best against eager, mid-range opponents, but drained of invention, vim, team libido and any sense of basic sporting coherence.

It was not so much the result, which might yet be reversed at Old Trafford: United have the attacking talent and the pedigree. It was more the tone, the sense of a champion team in an advanced stage of incremental disintegration. Part of the joy of the Champions League lies in detecting exactly what it is – attacking patterns, team spirit, outstanding players – that makes an unfamiliar team irresistible in their domestic league.

Looking at United on Tuesday it was easy to imagine baffled locals scratching their heads and wondering exactly what were the qualities that have somehow allowed this collection of coasting stars, once-weres, and never-will-bes to disport themselves around Europe as reigning champions of England.

There is a point of crisis being reached here. For all the excellent intentions among the club hierarchy and fans to allow Moyes time to build a team, United have lost six and won four of their past 12 games. The idea that qualification for next season’s Champions League might be achieved by winning the competition has been exposed as a touching delusion.

There is even a sense of liberation, of a lifting of the veil, in the realisation that what is needed here is not a steady hand or a light-touch succession but the total refurbishment of a team laced with fatigue and relative mediocrity.

Embarrassing defeats
There have, of course, been embarrassing defeats in Europe before, but few as bleak as this. United returned to the European Cup in 1993 after a 24-year break, resuming with a 5-3 aggregate victory against the now-defunct Kispest Honved, and ending their run that year on a slightly crazed night in Istanbul. Two years later they were thrashed 4-0 at the Camp Nou, and in the mid-1990s regularly beaten with chastening ease by Juventus.

But still, nothing really compares to this. United didn’t just look bad in Greece. Much worse, they didn’t look like United at all. A Manchester United who do not win titles but play with verve and fails on a grand scale – Big Ron’s United, Tommy Docherty’s United – is still recognisably United.

A Manchester United who lose like this, who play at half-speed and do die wondering, become unrecognisable. This is a club whose visceral appeal, grandest successes – and, yes, global brand – are all built out of a sense of adventure.

In Greece they were lacking in the noble desperation, the doomed sense of spirit that has traditionally accompanied United’s defeats in Europe. Even against superior opponents you expect a sense of epic, theatrical collapse. This was like watching a car crash in po-faced slow motion, a defeat of such meekness it is hard to know what to compare it with.

United here simply produced a cheap imitation of a pragmatic European away performance, with a midfield of static old heads, no movement between the lines of attack and a passive retreat into an old-style central block across the pitch. United looked, as they have too often, physically diminished. Early in the match Alejandro Dominguez simply ran straight through the centre of their midfield, stopped at the last by a desperate Nemanja Vidic tackle. Robin van Persie, reduced to lolling about in search of knock-downs and deflections, was regularly outmuscled by Kostas Manolas.

Weather with age
Throughout, only Olympiakos looked like a team at least attempting to play modern attacking Champions League-level football – and succeeding, too, as the second goal came shortly after Tom Cleverley was dispossessed high up the pitch. It is no surprise to see a similar energy lacking in a United team who have been allowed to weather with age. United famously failed to sign a single specialist midfielder for six years in between Owen Hargreaves and Marouane Fellaini, and have since signed two – Fellaini and Juan Mata – whose greatest failing is a basic lack of mobility.

It is hard to know exactly who to blame for this. There is the wider problem with investment in the team. United may be champions of England, still in the Champions League and a club in vibrant commercial good health, but they have been heavily out-recruited by their rivals in the Premier League and abroad. Their last real gung-ho summer of spending was seven years ago, since when what has gone out of the club every year has invariably looked better than what has come in.

Moyes may be restrained to a degree by his available personnel. He may also be a tactical Roundhead by inclination but given the near-impossible nature of a job so heavily laced with succession anxiety he might simply have been better served embracing his naivety in Europe, playing the Manchester United way with Adnan Januzaj and Shinji Kagawa on the pitch from the start and a team geared to go for the win that might also have brought defeat, but surely a less miserable one than this.

Moyes has nothing to lose here but his job. Perhaps the best he can hope for right now is to look, even in failure, like a Manchester United manager.
Guardian Service