I’ve been sitting with Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors this week and I couldn’t stop seeing Manchester United and Old Trafford in it. Bear with me. For those who haven’t read it, the play is about two sets of identical twins, both named Antipholus and both with a servant named Dromio, separated at birth by a shipwreck. They end up in the same city, Ephesus, and for five acts nobody knows who anyone really is. Masters beat the wrong servants, wives lock out the wrong husbands, merchants demand money from the wrong man. Everyone is absolutely convinced they are right, and everyone is completely wrong. It’s chaos born from mistaken identity. That is Manchester United right now. We lost 3-0 to Bournemouth at home yesterday. At home. That puts us on 7 points, 16th in the league, one point above the relegation zone and eight games without a win. Four days earlier we lost 4-1 to Como 1907 in the Champions League. The reports this morning are all the same, Carrick facing the axe, board speeding up the search for a successor, Bruno dropped from the starting XI. And the whole thing feels like a Shakespearean identity crisis. Who are we? Are we the Manchester United that finished third last season and started this season talking about a rebuild finally having credibility? Or are we the Manchester United that can’t beat Leeds, loses to Atletico, loses to Bournemouth, and looks like two completely different teams in the same shirt? Like Antipholus of Syracuse and Antipholus of Ephesus, we have two Uniteds walking around in identical kits. One is the club we think we are in press conferences and on paper. The other is the club everyone else sees on the pitch, confused, ill-disciplined, arguing over who owes what to whom. In the play, everyone keeps punishing the wrong person. Adriana scolds the wrong Antipholus for being a bad husband. Angelo arrests the wrong man for debt. That’s exactly what we’re doing right now. We blame Carrick one week, the players the next, the board after that. We’re beating the wrong Dromio every single week because we can’t figure out which twin is actually causing the mess. The funniest, and saddest part of The Comedy of Errors is that the chaos goes on for so long because nobody stops to ask the simplest question - “Wait, are you who I think you are?”. We’ve spent three years since Ten Hag doing the same thing. New manager, same question unanswered. We keep acting like the grand, imperial United of Ephesus when we are, in reality, the shipwrecked, lost United of Syracuse trying to find our brother. Shakespeare only fixes it in Act 5 when the Abbess, basically the only adult in the room lines both sets of twins up next to each other and forces everyone to look. The errors end when the illusion ends. That’s what we need. Not another sacking that swaps one Antipholus for the other and hopes no one notices. We need someone to line up the two identities of this club, the myth and the reality and be honest about which one showed up against Bournemouth. Until then, we’re just living Act 1 to 4 on loop.

Mikel Arteta actually got rattled after he got snubbed at the Ballon D'or. Fleetwood town putting Arsenal to the sword is a great way to rub it in for him and his misfits.