It was early December 2013. Manchester United had just lost 1-0 to Newcastle United. It meant the reigning champs had lost back-to-back home matches for the first time since 2002, and it was Newcastle's first win at Old Trafford since before the end of the Vietnam War. In his first season replacing Sir Alex Ferguson, David Moyes had managed the team to just 22 points from 15 matches. Nearly midway through the season, they were in ninth — four points closer to the relegation zone than to first place.

Just about everything was going wrong, as confirmed by the manager and the club in one of the all-time-great team-account tweets of the early Twitter era. No memes, no weird half-ironies only understood by those of us who spend all day refreshing our accounts, no context necessary. Just this plain-spoken bit of perfection: "David Moyes says #mufc must improve in a number of areas, including passing, creating chances and defending."

Now, I wrote about how Manchester United hadn't advanced beyond the Moyes era … three years ago. And yet, that tweet from 2013 might be even more relevant today than when it was first published. Two games into the current campaign, United sit last in the league table, with two losses from two games and a minus-5 goal differential.

If new manager Erik ten Hag is going to turn this thing around, his team must improve in a number of key areas, including passing, creating chances and defending. But how?

Passing

At Ajax, Ten Hag's teams aggressively built out from the back, drawing opponents to them and then breaking the pressure with slick passing combinations or, say, Frenkie De Jong dribbling past the entire team all by himself.

Much to the chagrin of Ten Hag (and Barcelona), United do not have Frenkie De Jong. And the closest archetype to De Jong that United have had, Paul Pogba, is now playing for Juventus. So over the first two matches, United have tried to pass the ball out from the back — and they've failed, miserably. Against Brentford, they turned the ball over within 40 meters of their own goal six times: three of them led to turnovers, and two of them led to goals.

Through two matches, they've turned the ball over 15 times within 40 yards of their own goal, with eight of those turnovers directly leading to shots. Last season, they allowed 1.6 of those shot-generating high turnovers per match.

"Passing," of course, is a vague term, and a number of factors go into whether a pass is completed. No two passes are created equal or occur in a vacuum. The player on the ball needs to be able to recognize the pass and then execute it with the right degree of technical precision. But the receiver also has to find space and be able to receive the ball, with those same responsibilities flipping around for his next action, and so on and so on. Passing is a collective act, a chain of decisions and reactions that create more decisions and more reactions.