Manchester United have somehow managed to start the week in even bigger crisis than Manchester City after both suffered painful defeats on a weekend where many of their relegation rivals picked up valuable points.

It’s all eyes now on when not if Michael Carrick gets the Spanish archer.

Book of revelations
The Manchester United Crisis is very different in scale and scope to the Manchester City Crisis, but both are now in LIVE blog territory where the same news is rehashed every 45 minutes in lieu of any actual updates.

The Sun go big with their headline this morning.

MIC DROP: Michael Carrick LIVE: Man Utd manager’s future in huge doubt with two frontrunners ‘revealed’ – latest updates

Those cowardly, snide little sky commas are well deserved for the headline ‘revelation’ that Eddie Howe and Julian Nagelsmann are among the frontrunners.

And don’t think we didn’t spot the dystopian byline on this blog of churning shod.

Daniel Clark | Connor Greaves, Senior Sport SEO Editor – Supported by AI

The game has never been more gone.

The Hateful Eight
Genius-level filler from the Mirror as we all await the inevitable putting out of his misery that awaits Michael Carrick after his beleaguering reached new levels of horror this weekend.

8 Man Utd players would face frosty reunion as Roy Keane tipped to replace Michael Carrick

Now it should be noted that the total extent of this tipping of Roy Keane to replace Michael Carrick amounts to Quinton Fortune (you remember), who is now one of the vast rotating cast of ex-footballers who make a comfortable living by having opinions for money from bookmakers, saying this to one of them:

“Roy Keane coaching at Man Utd would be a lot of fun. I was fortunate to play alongside Roy, and he was an unbelievable leader. He pushed every team to success and raised everyone’s standards.

“I thoroughly enjoyed working with him in training and matches because he demanded excellence and made you a better player.”

That is it. That is the tip. Now it would be enough of a stretch just to turn that into a news story. To their immense credit, the Mirror have instead gone further still and the trouble of finding eight (not sure why only eight but we assume the capricious algorithm gods have deemed that their preferred number for the next 96 hours) Man United players who might not enjoy a Roy Keane reunion that – and we cannot stress this enough – has absolutely no chance of ever happening.

Just in case this most absurdly hypothetical of pieces has nevertheless tickled the curiosity-gap sensors in your lizard brain as it did ours: Bruno Fernandes, Harry Maguire, Marcus Rashford, Luke Shaw, Lisandro Martinez, Diogo Dalot, Kobbie Mainoo, Mason Mount.

Point of order
The Mirror fall back on an old favourite here with the latest on the crisis engulfing Manchester United.

Harry Maguire points finger for Man Utd loss and speaks out on Michael Carrick’s future

It’s not even the first time they’ve used this technique specifically about Manchester United, with it now seeming adorable that the last time they did it was to try and make things sound bad for United after they actually won a game, if you’re old enough to remember such a concept.

But the key to it is to phrase the headline to imply the direction of the finger-pointing or blame-directing is anything but squarely at themselves.

Maguire pointed the finger at Manchester United’s players, very much himself included, while backing the manager.

“As individuals, we’re not playing well enough,” is what he said. It’s just not the standard connotation that comes with the pointing of fingers.

At least when the Mirror were doing this back at the start of September the crisis was nascent enough that it arguably needed a little bit of sexing up. That is very much no longer the case.

Back out
Writes Samuel Luckhurst for The Sun in his version of the understandably samey opinion piece every journalist wrote yesterday (That, while Carrick clearly isn’t the main problem with Manchester United, he does also very obviously need to be sacked):

There was gallows humour on the Stretford End as they told Sir Jim Ratcliffe to shove his new stadium up his backside.

Not sure that’s exactly how they phrased it. It doesn’t scan.

Intrigue and mystery
Luckhurst is back on the beat this morning to ignite and then almost instantly defuse some Bruno Fernandes intrigue as he breathlessly reports on who has or hasn’t rocked up at Carrington this morning.

Intriguingly, Bruno Fernandes also arrived at Carrington even though it is a day off for the squad.

Luckhurst allows that intrigue to bubble up for all of two paragraphs before popping it.

The only other players who turned up on Monday are injured and it is understood the club captain was there to receive treatment.

Peak condition
Manchester United’s hopes of poaching Fabian Hurzeler from Brighton have had a major boost, courtesy of the Daily Express.

Fabian Hurzeler ‘could perform Man Utd U-turn’ on one condition to replace Michael Carrick

The only slight drawback? That one pesky, tiny, trivial little condition is that he wouldn’t do it until the end of the season.

Forgive Mediawatch for getting slightly ahead of ourselves here, but we don’t think the end of the season is the time United are going to be on the hunt for their Carrick replacement.

Unless they plan to sack Carrick and then immediately reappoint him as interim manager until Hurzeler is theoretically possibly maybe available. It could work.

Veil to the chief
More Hurzeler news. There are very few headline trends that are built on underplaying what’s actually been said, but ‘thinly-veiled’ can often be one of them.

Of course, there is only one thing in Headline Land that can ever be thinly-veiled and that is? That’s right, it’s a ‘dig’. The problem is that what a headline calls a ‘thinly-veiled dig’ is always either a) not actually a dig at all or b) not actually veiled at all.

Take this one, from the Mirror, for instance.

Fabian Hurzeler aims thinly-veiled dig at Liverpool after Brighton lose at Anfield

The only thing thinly-veiled here is Fabian Hurzeler’s dome. Because his dig at Liverpool after Brighton’s 2-0 defeat at Anfield can be called many things. Salty. Inaccurate. Slightly embarrassing. But what it absolutely did not have was any kind of veil.

“Everyone in the stadium saw that there was one team who really tried to create and try to win this game and therefore I have to praise my players.”

Lads, this is just a dig. You don’t have to use the full cliché just because it’s the cliché.

Star aligns
Hats off to the Daily Star, though, for doing what everyone else seems to have missed and combining those last two bits and bobs into one glorious whole.

Liverpool news: Man Utd manager target hurls dig at Andoni Iraola as ‘golden rule’ broken

That’s the good stuff. But can one in fact hurl a dig? Mediawatch fears they are more traditionally ‘aimed’ than ‘hurled’. Abuse, that’s hurled. Criticism too, sometimes. But not a dig. We don’t make the rules.