His remarks on Tuesday night that United were “six years behind” Liverpool did not go down well at the club who, even at this nadir, believe that fortunes can be changed much quicker than that. Murtough has been the driving force in the push to appoint a new manager and the selection of Erik Ten Hag, assisted by Darren Fletcher, the club’s technical director.

It has been an awkward reality that Fletcher has kept his matchday position on the bench, given to him by Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, while also participating in the meetings to decide the man who will take the job Rangnick had wanted for himself. It is not uncommon in German football for the sporting director to sit with the manager and his staff but Rangnick has taken issue with Fletcher shouting instructions during games and asked him to stop doing so. It has surprised Rangnick that Fletcher has also occasionally opted to participate in training when the first team group has been a player short.

Rangnick had been ever more critical about his players, who have failed to respond to his coaching. Unable to appoint the assistant coaches he had originally wanted because of work permit issues, and without the players’ commitment to a wholesale change in style there has been precious little shift. He has found that many of his more technically gifted players simply do not have the intensity required in a Premier League dominated by Manchester City and Liverpool teams who have signed and developed players with both qualities.

By contrast it has tended to be the less gifted players at United – Fred, Scott McTominay – who have shown the greater commitment. Rangnick felt that Mason Greenwood was his prime candidate when it came to raw ability combined with application on the pitch, with the added bonus that he was young and still mouldable. The police investigation and suspension that has engulfed the 20 year-old has been a huge blow to his manager. The severity of the allegations naturally overshadowing it all.

A good coach, and a shrewd identifier of potential talent, Rangnick has typically worked with young players hungry for professional careers and willing to submit to the team ethic. At United, Rangnick has encountered the opposite – wealthy, successful senior professionals with their own ideas about the game and no pressure to change. Shifting the attitudes of a critical mass of first team players so late in their careers has just proved impossible.

Rangnick had long planned that the players would have time off before the last international break if Liverpool’s FA Cup progress meant that the original day scheduled for the Anfield league game, March 20, was changed. That turned out to be the case and even though the last game before the break was a defeat to Atletico Madrid at home – and Champions League elimination – Rangnick still gave the players time off before they joined up with international squads. Like much else that he has tried, that too had little effect on performance.

On Tuesday, by the start of the second half, the original plan had been abandoned. The man whose ideas influenced many German coaches, and whose precepts of pressing zones and rigorous tactical organisation were considered sacrosanct, was changing systems and tactics minute to minute. He had left out Alex Telles, a left-back, in favour of Diogo Dalot being switched from right-back to deal with the threat from Mohamed Salah. Perhaps Dalot could be said to have been a success. Salah, who scored a hat-trick at Old Trafford in October, only scored two on this occasion.

Without a defensive midfielder apart from the ever-more immobile Nemanja Matic, and Paul Pogba injured almost immediately, he was forced to send on Jesse Lingard to play in midfield. Another attempt to shock the team out of its mediocrity had failed and the powerful United voices in the television studio wondered whether Rangnick would indeed last the season. He would have to acknowledge that his time in charge has fallen well short of expectations, and also that he has not come close to being able to play the style of football that got him the job in the first place.