OLIVER HOLT: Man United are nothing more than mid-table mediocrity

There are some things that are clear even after two weekends of the Premier League season. Arsenal will be there in the shake-up for the title next May. Manchester United will not.

To be at Craven Cottage on a balmy Sunday afternoon and see Ruben Amorim's side labour to a painful, uncertain 1-1 draw with Fulham was to be assailed with an uncomfortable sense of deja vu.

There was Bruno Fernandes, ballooning a penalty so high over the Fulham crossbar that his kick launched a thousand memes purporting to show people staring at the ball in wonder as it sailed across the night sky.

There was Fernandes moaning at the referee for giving an obvious foul against Manuel Ugarte. There was Amad Diallo giving the ball away cheaply. There was Casemiro being bypassed in midfield.

There was Luke Shaw making his 200th appearance, asking the question why United have still not moved on from him yet. There were Fulham, cutting through United's defence like a knife through butter in the closing stages, as the visitors clung on to a point for dear life.

Yes, the new £200m front three of Bryan Mbeumo, Matheus Cunha and Benjamin Sesko - when Sesko finally got off the bench - was marginally more lively than the moribund trio that occupied those positions last season. But that is a low bar. A very low bar.

Then there was the goalkeeper, Altay Bayindir, who was preferred again to Andre Onana. Bayindir proceeded to look, just as he had against Arsenal last weekend, like a liability at corners, sowing confusion whenever a ball sailed into the box. Bayindir looked as if he was waving forlornly at friends rather than trying to catch a cross.

No wonder United are said to be close to signing Senne Lammens for £17m from Royal Antwerp to try to fix the problem. Fixing United is like a game of whack-a-mole these days. They think they have sorted one issue. Then another appears.

The reality is that this is a team still dominated by mediocrity. It is a team of has-beens and never-will-bes. It is a team that will be a million miles off winning the league. It is a team that has very little chance of making the top four.

If they're lucky, they might challenge for the top six but after watching them in south-west London, I'd be surprised if they achieved that. None of this exactly comes as a surprise to anyone, I know. United were 15th last season. They are coming from a long, long way back.

Messages are still mixed, too. Why did Sesko not start? Why did Amorim bring on Manuel Ugarte to try to protect United's lead in the second half when Ugarte has already shown he is not good enough for a job like that and showed it again. There's a reason why PSG kicked on when they got rid of him.

It still feels like listening to a dirge being at a United game. The muscle memory of people like me, who still remember their Treble year and all the triumphs either side of it tells us that this should not be happening.

But the reality is that United are a mid-table side now. Watching them play as they did at Craven Cottage should not be a surprise but somehow, after all the money they have spent and because of the giants they once were, it always is.

United had started like an express train. Cunha, playing in the centre of the front three, whistled a shot over the bar in the first minute and sidefooted a shot against the face of Bernd Leno's left-hand post two minutes later.

Cunha was playing beautifully. He ran on to a long clearance from Bayindir and, as the ball dropped over his shoulder, he took it down perfectly on his right foot and lashed a shot goalwards. Leno produced a fine save to push it away.

The rest of the half became attritional until, eight minutes from the interval, referee Chris Kavanagh was alerted by VAR to a wrestling match between Calvin Bassey and Mason Mount that had just occurred in the Fulham box.

Kavanagh viewed the footage, which looked like highlights from a bout of judo and also showed Shaw throwing Rodrigo Muniz to the floor at the same time as Bassey and Mount's altercation.

Something has to be done to stop these absurd antics and in the light of the new refereeing directives, Mr Kavanagh awarded a penalty to United. Fernandes took the kick and ballooned it so high over the bar that someone may have had to fish it out of the River Thames.

Maybe someone asked Bayindir to do it. The way he flailed at a series of Fulham corners in the last minutes of the half, he looked more like a swimmer practising front crawl. There must be more chance of him reaching a ball in the water than catching one in the air.

So there was some irony in the fact that United took the lead from a corner just before the hour. Leny Yoro rose to meet a Mbeumo corner and even if he only made faint contact, the ball cannoned off the back of Muniz and beat Leno's attempt to keep it out.

It was clear that Yoro pushed Bassey in the back with both hands as the corner was taken but VAR and the referee chose to ignore that particular infringement. Marco Silva, the Fulham boss, made his displeasure known from the bench.

Silva may have felt some sort of justice was served when Fulham equalised in the 73rd minute. Alex Iwobi cut inside from the left and curled in a cross. Raul Jimenez poked a foot at it and missed but Emile Smith Rowe met it at the near post and prodded it beyond Bayindir.

A draw was probably a fair result. It was a fair reflection of where United are at. One point from two games, sitting in 16th place, ordinary players giving an ordinary performance. Progress, it appears, is going to be slow.