Man Utd's players have no more appetite for pressing under Ralf Rangnick than with Solskjaer

No prizes for guessing what Manchester United's players will be working on in training for the next 10 days.

The Red Devils do not play again in the Premier League until January 15, when they travel to Aston Villa and in that time they can expect to be chasing around Carrington pressing anything that moves.

United's interim manager, Ralf Rangnick, made his name by developing and refining the tactic, which has since been turned into an art form by Europe's most successful managers, Jurgen Klopp being the principal exponent.

So, it has been alarming to see that five games into his tenure at Old Trafford, Rangnick has struggled to persuade his new charges to pressurize their opponents and win the ball back high up the pitch.

While the United players responded to Rangnick's desire to force the issue in the opposition half in the new man's first two games, that intent has dissolved in the three matches that followed.

Eighteen minutes into the first half at home to Wolves on Monday it seemed the players had abandoned the approach altogether.

The away fans were chanting 'ole' as their gold-shirted players sprayed the ball all around the Theatre of Dreams, en-route to a comfortable victory.

It wasn't meant to be like this.

'We didn't press at all,' conceded a troubled Rangnick at full time. 'We tried but we were not able to get into those pressing situations.'

Opta stats reveal that United have managed 12.6 pressed sequences per game under Rangnick, compared with 12.7 under former boss, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.

There has been little change in other pressing metrics too, including high turnovers, or high turnovers leading to shots, or attacks launched high up the pitch.

The key component of any successful press is team work: Willing runners up front trigger the defensive actions of their team mates behind them. It is hard work and needs an unwavering commitment to back each other up.

Hence, the absence of coherent pressing will only fuel concern over a divided dressing room, which has become the dominant narrative this week

The average figures over Rangnick's five matches clearly do not tell the whole story.

They mask the more worrying trend that the players did press at first, but apparently haven't bought into the idea after their matches against Crystal Palace and Norwich City.

Are the 'coach killers', who have already accounted for one manager in Solskjaer this season, at it again?

A metric that is often used to measure the intensity of a team's pressing is opposition passes per defensive action (PPDA), which logs the number of passes a team allows the opponent to make before attempting to win the ball back.

The average PPDA for United actually shows an improvement from 14.4 passes under Solskjaer to 12.4 under Rangnick. However, it has dropped off dramatically.

In Rangnick's first game in charge, Palace were on average allowed to make ten passes before being pressed by United, which may not put the Red Devils on the leader board of Europe's 'pressing monsters', but it was demonstrably a good effort that impressed and surprised the boss.

However, the PPDA against Burnley last week was 20.6 and versus Wolves it was 16.

And other statistics support the downward trend. In the last three matches against Newcastle, Burnley and Wolves, United players put opponents under pressure in the opposition half on 22 occasions, on average.

This is well short of the 27 pressures they achieved in an average game across all of Solskjaer's matches in charge this season.

On those numbers, United have gone backwards, literally and metaphorically. Ralf Rangnick has some work to do.