I'll explain.
It takes an incredible amount of mental fortitude to just feature at this level, to be part of the 0.012% (as Rashford calls it). City and Liverpool didn't outwill the ball into the net, they put in great amounts of effort and they had the quality (player/coaching) to make the effort count for something. I didn't see enough to question our effort... The quality from a coaching or player perspective just wasn't there.
But in the context of relativity, the % needed to get 'there' bears no meaning as it's the bar and from there the percentages reduce further and further where the proverbial wheat is separated from the proverbial chaff - some manage to tread water in the pool of premier league football, others become Olympians relative to them, and further still, the likes of a C.Ronaldo or Roy Keane go on to be all-time revered for their mentality and obsession with self-improvement.
It actually doesn't matter the sport, there are clear and marked distinctions between so-called peers in terms of mental fortitude and how much more they can dig when the chips are down.
I don't think it matters what the actual quality of
any team at
any level is, the distinction between triers and not is always, always apparent.
I believe if we fought tooth and nail for everything and came up short, fans at large would be more forgiving and empathetic than when they see the collective dropping of heads we are accustomed to and have now become accepting of.
We are disastrously poorly coached, and that exacerbates the lack of belief, but how many players in this squad have the wherewithal within themselves to fight, defiantly against the tide? Forget ability, just on pure mental obdurate resilience, how many at the club have the fire in their belly and the pride associative of Manchester United? It's actually a surprise these days when we do not yield once a game is obumbrated and becomes a genuine pull-your-sleeves up struggle - that used to be synonymous with United and practically a lifeblood of our teams.
The 60's, 70's and 80's saw us in mid-ish table mediocrity for the majority of it, but rarely would the teams be said to lack conviction and mental strength. Quality? Sure, but mental weakness? That is generally foreign to a club like Manchester United whilst the tag has tended to sit easily with teams like Spurs and the past it Wenger Arsenal.
Let's face it, if there were two separate tabulations, one for points and the other for conviction of purpose, we'd be close to the bottom of the latter in the entire league, too, where in the past, any iteration of United, be they serial winners or the sides who were not successful, would comfortably sit in the top 4 for the league at all times.