Man Utd running stats: bottom of the league without the ball

Bottom for sprints. Bottom for high-intensity distance. Bottom for time spent sprinting. Those are Man Utd's running stats after five league games, from GeniusIQ data Sky Sports ran after Fulham and Reuters picked up the same day. Twentieth out of twenty in all four. We're 17th for the share of time spent walking when the other side has the ball.

That's a club that finished third last season. Under the same head coach.

We've had a fortnight of international break to stare at those numbers, and nobody at the club has explained them. So here's what they actually show, game by game, because "they don't run enough" is the lazy version and the real version is worse.

Read more: Leeds 1-1 Man Utd: no striker and no answer after the break

Fulham was the worst of it

At Craven Cottage on 20 September we spent 52.98% of our time out of possession walking, our highest figure of the season, and Fulham ran 6.5km more than us. Sky's numbers say Fulham started their passing moves 36.9 metres from our goal on average, the closest any team got all weekend. Read that again. They weren't breaking through a press. There wasn't one. They were strolling into our half and starting from there.

Gary Neville, on commentary, said: "I've never seen a Man Utd team walk out of possession as much as that." He also called one spell after the break "the worst 15 minutes I've ever seen". Neville gets carried away on United, everyone knows that. He wasn't carried away here. Fulham took the lead in the 63rd minute through a Lisandro Martínez own goal and we needed Cunha in the 89th to scrape a point.

Cunha said it better than anyone at the club has: "In the beginning of the second half, they put in more energy than us and we cannot accept this," and "We always play better after conceding a goal, and it cannot be like this." A player, saying out loud that we only start working once we're losing. In September.

The goals arrive late, every time

This is the bit I've not seen anyone put together. Take the eight league goals we've conceded and look at when they came.

• City's winner, on the hour, against ten men.
• Fulham's, 63rd minute.
• Everton's equaliser on 82 minutes, and then Maitland-Niles in stoppage time, after Šeško had put us 2-1 up on 88.

That's at least four of the eight from the 60th minute on, and the two at Hull were both from set pieces, which is its own scandal. Add the League Cup. We were 2-0 up on Brighton after ten minutes and lost 3-2, the first time United have lost a home game from 2-0 up in 50 years. Sky worked out we'd won 143 of the previous 145. We didn't have a shot on target from Mount's goal until the 76th minute.

So it's not that we can't run. It's that we stop. The legs go, or the will goes, somewhere after the hour, and the other side walks through the gap. Everton's late goals cost us two points. Fulham's would have cost us one more if Cunha hadn't bailed us out. Brighton's cost us a cup.

The counterargument, and why it doesn't save him

The honest case against all this is that running numbers don't win games. City were down to ten men from the 23rd minute of the derby, played 67 minutes a man short, and still beat us 1-0, with us managing two shots on target in all that time. Nobody's calling City lazy.

And our attacking numbers aren't awful. We've had 113 shots, more than anyone in the league, and an xG of 10.24, third-best. We had 29 shots at Fulham alone.

But that's exactly why this lands on Michael Carrick. If the chances were missing, you'd say it's the squad, the injuries, Šeško being out. The chances aren't missing. What's missing is the work without the ball and the legs in the last half-hour, and that's coaching, fitness work and game management. That's the manager's department, and he's said so himself. After Brighton: "The performance towards the end of the second half, that's on me."

Fine. It is on him.

His record when he took over last season was 12 wins, 3 draws and 2 defeats in 17. This season it's two wins in seven in all competitions. Same man, many of the same players. Something changed over the summer, and pre-season is where you'd look first.

What the break has to fix

Spurs at Old Trafford on Saturday is the first game back. They're bottom. If we're still walking at 52% out of possession and fading after an hour against them, there's no hiding behind the derby or a Brighton cup tie any more.

Carrick has had three weeks without a game, with the internationals away for most of it. With Atlético away three days after Spurs, he won't get a stretch like it again for a while. We'll find out on Saturday whether he used it.