“I’ve watched a lot of Nico Paz and I’ve got to tell you, you’ve got to close him down more quickly,” said Adam Summerton on commentary.

It sounds like we’ve not watched as much of Paz, but would have advised Harry Maguire to be closer than five yards away from any professional footballer on the edge of his box, let alone Como’s best player and the heir to Lionel Messi’s No.10 shirt for Argentina.

It was a beautiful curled finish into the far corner from a hugely talented footballer, but we would back most players at Champions League level to score from what was effectively a free-kick in prime position with no wall to speak of.

After getting the job done in a must-not-lose game against Leeds on Sunday in a manner which drew predictable scoffing from the increasingly fatigued This Is Manchester United We’re Talking About brigade, Maguire urged his teammates to “be a bit braver with the ball”.

He added: “We’re in a circumstance where we are not as brave as we should be, and we have to get that back because to win games for Manchester United we have to have that bravery and composure.”

Ball bravery isn’t Maguire’s forte. But his teammates failed to carry out the centre-back’s ‘do as I say, not as I do’ request on the banks of Lake Como to such an extent that it was as though the game was 11 Cesc Fabregases vs 11 Harry Maguires.

Matheus Cunha and Andrey Santos were hooked at half-time but it’s hard to sort chaff from chaff, and had Michael Carrick made a switch purely on the performance level of each player and not on reputation or past experience, Bruno Fernandes would have been doing his sulking in the stands for all of the second half rather than on the pitch for another 20 minutes before being put out of his misery.

He was genuinely awful, miscontrolling the ball, forcing passes that weren’t and were never on and of course blaming everyone but himself for the mess that he was at the centre of. This is becoming a 2025/26 Mohamed Salah of a season for him. The end comes quickly for players at this stage of their careers.

Fernandes is a problem for Carrick even when he’s playing well as Jason Wilcox has handed the United manager a squad without the midfield energy to grant the captain enough freedom in the No.10 position. None of Santos, Kobbie Mainoo or Youri Tielemans have the legs to play together behind him. Arguably he needs two Carlos Baleba’s in a double pivot; not one. Or at least two slightly better Carlos Balebas.

He came on at half-time and set about kicking his way through a few Como players, but even a Man Utd player threatening to come out of a game with credit ended up at best at net zero as he was caught in possession by Paz before the playmaker powered away from a despairing Tielemans to put Como 3-0 up.

Matthijs de Ligt may now hope he had waited a little longer to make his long-awaited return to action. No defender wants a co-commentator to react to their attempt to stop a striker from scoring like a misty-eyed widow regaling her grandchildren with a tale of her late husband burning Christmas dinner in 1995. “Bless him,” said Glenn Hoddle after Anastasios Douvikas latched on to Paz’s smart through ball before passing the ball into the top corner with De Ligt nowhere near him.

We all know Carrick isn’t the biggest problem and Wilcox is now quite rightly fielding a large portion of blame, much more of which should be aimed at the Glazers and Sir Jim Ratcliffe. But Carrick also can’t and actually may not want to survive this.

If this goes on much longer he can look forward to a UEFA advisory role like one Ole Gunnar Soskjaer, maybe after a brief managerial swansong at a club duped into hiring him because he once stood on the touchline for a former European giant.

“It’s men against boys,” said Hoddle when the fourth Como goal went in. “Which Man Utd have done to teams over the years, let’s be clear.”

Yes, let us be absolutely clear: Manchester United used to be the men and now they’re the boys.