Cristiano Ronaldo and Steven Gerrard’s darkest day – The Warm-Up

That looks like the end, then. A short, controversial, confusing adventure, which began with grand promises of glory restored and ended with a smirk and an early exit. But enough about the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, let's talk about Cristiano Ronaldo.

As seems to be the way of things these days, this story is escalating hour by hour. When Ronaldo stropped off down the tunnel on Wednesday night, it looked like he was leaving early. A fit of pique at not getting on; nothing more. Then it was reported that he'd actually refused to come on. Then he was dropped for the Chelsea game. And now we learn that Erik ten Hag is "furious", and that United are actively looking to cancel his contract. By the time you're reading this, Ronaldo may well be the new Aston Villa manager (more on that debacle below).

Ronaldo has apologised, of course. Well, sort of. You'd be looking at his statement for a long time before you found the word 'sorry', or 'apology', or 'definitely won't be doing that again, absolutely not, no sirree'. "Sometimes the heat of the moment gets the best of us" is true enough, but it doesn't really explain anything much. Not least because Manchester United were playing really well. It's not like he was laughing his head off and flicking the v's at the away fans. That's a moment's heat that would make sense.

Making it clear that you can't enjoy your team winning, unless it's all about you, is a pretty good way to make yourself look actively unnecessary. Taking off early is childish on its own merits, but nothing too serious. In this context, though, it looks damning: the impotent fury of the newly obsolescent. Ronaldo sees the future becoming the present, and he hates it, for it holds no place for him. United won without him, and then they went back to the dressing room and celebrated without him.

It also, presumably, makes Jorge Mendes' job a lot harder. We found out over the summer that none of the teams that can afford Ronaldo, want Ronaldo, so if there is a route back to the Champions League, it almost certainly comes as a willing squad player. Not a good moment to be delivering a public masterclass on one's complete inability to be a willing squad player. And with a World Cup coming up in a month, perhaps not a great moment to get yourself exiled from first-team training.

As Marcus Foley pointed out yesterday, Ronaldo's ongoing delusion is . But we're guessing that Erik ten Hag's fury, while genuine, is laced with just a little thrill of satisfaction. This season was always going to be an argument about Ronaldo, from the moment he asked to leave and found nowhere to go. Now Ten Hag has evidence from the pitch that he doesn't need him, and evidence from the touchline that he can't trust him. Paying Ronaldo off in January will be eye-wateringly, ear-bleedingly expensive. But it will accelerate the process of making this a Ten Hag team, and make it easier to ask for a striker.

And perhaps, thinking more long term, it will provide a handy lesson for the club as a whole. There's nothing wrong with picking up a veteran here and there. But in recent years United have been utterly in thrall to the cult of footballing celebrity, playing a game as unwise as it is expensive. Perhaps the sight of the ultimate footballing celebrity taking himself off down the tunnel, unable to conceive of a world that doesn't revolve around him, will lead to a little bit of reflection in the United boardroom. Hope springs eternal.

That's that, then. A short time in charge, a lot of money spent, and nothing much to show for it except the absence of all that money. Well, and a lot of very upset supporters. And a breakdown of discipline. And some genuine survival concerns. But enough about the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, let's talk about Steven Gerrard.

It's a cruel game. Following Villa's 3-0 defeat last night, Gerrard came out to do his media. And he said what he was bound to say: that he wouldn't quit, that he didn't know the meaning of the word quit, that he refused to allow the word quit in his house, that he tore it out of his dictionaries, that he wouldn't play it in Scrabble even if there was a triple word score right there.

Then they sacked him.

It's hard to argue with the decision. If a football fan had awoken from a years-long coma just before last night's game, and decided against all medical advice to watch it, then it wouldn't have taken them long to identify Villa as a team in deep and fundamental trouble. All failing football teams have the same energy, the same gangrenous stink. Everything a little bit off, everything a tick slower, everything just a little imprecise. Bad vibes, up and down the pitch; muddled minds. (That's what the new manager bounce is, more than anything else. A huge sigh of collective relief.)

So you could call the red card harsh, and you could note that Aleksandar Mitrovic bought it with a quite spectacular grab and roll. You could argue, too, that the penalty was a little bit pedantic, it being one of those ones where the defender's most egregious sin is 'having arms'. But the moment to moment decisions only reflected the deeper truth of Villa's messiness, and so even if they were technically disputable, the spirit in which they were made was absolutely correct.

It's a hat-trick, of sorts: red card, penalty, own goal. The perfect hat-trick of the failing team. Douglas Luiz, Matty Cash, Tyrone Mings, you may each take one third of the match ball home. Hide it somewhere out of sight. Never speak of it again.

This all leaves Villa in a very awkward spot, and we don't just mean 17th in the table. Gerrard's appointment wasn't just a case of dropping a coach into an already-functioning setup; instead they retooled the club around his profile. Philippe Coutinho is emblematic here: his history with Gerrard was key to the move, and yet he only made sense as a permanent signing if that history could somehow be rendered into consistency. This hasn't worked, and now Coutinho becomes somebody else's problem. In a world of club strategies and sensible long-term transfer planning, it's a pleasingly old-school mess.

We can assume that Villa's hierarchy are right at this moment trying their very best to persuade Mauricio Pochettino that perhaps, if he wants, this could all be his problem. But it's going to be a hard sell. Meanwhile, just down the road, Wolves have failed to tempt Gerrard's former assistant Michael Beale away from QPR. Perhaps that's a sign of another awkwardness, here in this moment: the exciting up-and-comers are all a few months into their exciting projects, and a relegation battle just doesn't have the same appeal.

Basically, what we're saying is that Villa really don't want to be looking for a new manager from 17th in the table. Certainly not having just bet the farm on the last guy. And ideally not in November. Wherever they're going, they don't want to start from here.

Modern football has its bad points, but one thing we will always enjoy - and we mean this quite sincerely - is derby games being given a name, a localised spin on El Clasico. The more contrived the better. Cheltenham vs. Forest Green? That's 'El Glossico'. Inverness Caledonian Thistle vs. Ross County? 'El Kessocko', apparently, after the Kessock Bridge. Good clean fun for the whole family.

LA Galaxy against LAFC could only be El Trafico, and while you were sleeping the two teams had themselves a right old argument. It's the MLS play-offs, it's a conference semi-final, and here's something really rather special from Dejan Joveljic in the 85th minute.

And here, less special as a goal but quite something as a moment, is LAFC's 93rd minute winner. We're not sure what the American word for "scenes" is, but hopefully they've got one.

If you've not been following the scandal engulfing the world of chess, a brief recap. Lots of people, including current best chessperson Magnus Carlsen, think that grandmaster Hans Niemann has been cheating. Niemann has now responded with a lawsuit. And that lawsuit includes, as evidence, the Jose Mourinho 'If I Speak' Meme.

There's winning titles. There's winning the Champions League. And then there's this, a place claimed in the proceedings of the very law itself. The only way this can be topped is for Carlsen to respond to the lawsuit by posting the meme again. If you're reading, Magnus, this is definitely a good idea. No, not a lawyer, not as such.

You know it, of course. The matchstick crowd flowing out of the terraced houses into Burnden Park, the chimneys looming hazy on the horizon. L.S. Lowry's Going to the Match occupies a place at the very centre of the British football imaginary: how football used to look; how football is, perhaps, supposed to look.

And it went up for sale the other day. Here's the Athletic's Jacob Whitehead on a painting that was bought by the PFA for just under £2m yet went up for auction for about three times that, and in the process "terrified Manchester’s art scene". What if the painting vanished overseas into a private collection?

"Lowry is at the centre of the city’s culture, not just with the paintings and museum, but also offshoots like the Lowry Hotel — famously occupied by Jose Mourinho while managing United — and Oasis' video for The Masterplan. … Two weeks before the sale, Paul Dennett, Labour’s mayor for Salford, launched a campaign to keep Going to the Match in the north west."

Happily enough, Manchester's Lowry gallery was able to secure the painting for a total of £7.8m. This means two things. One, it stays in the north-east, where new generations of matchstick people can file in to see their antecedents. And two, Going to the Match is worth exactly as much as David Luiz when he moved to Arsenal.

Game of the day comes in Portugal, where Benfica are off to Porto to face, er, Porto. In the Championship, Ipswich Town host Derby County.