"I am not shocked," Louis van Gaal said. "Milton Keynes played very well, very aggressively. And we had nine injuries. We also had to play within 48 hours so I could not play with the same squad as on Sunday."
Manchester United fielded a line-up worth £69.9 million yet Van Gaal was not surprised a team comprising of four World Cup players could perform so abjectly and lose 4-0 against League One opponents.
United's loss to MK Dons, days after their ponderous performance at Sunderland, felt like Van Gaal's last efforts to weed out the dead wood from the squad. The club's embarrassing 1-0 win over Conference side Crawley three-and-a-half years ago signalled the death knell for the likes of John O'Shea, Wes Brown, Gabriel Obertan, Bébé and Darron Gibson.
Now the MK debacle could signal the end of numerous United careers...