At Old Trafford on Wednesday night, Manchester United surrendered a two-goal lead to Brighton, losing 3-2 in the Carabao Cup — a collapse that stretches back, in its rarity, to 1976. Under interim manager Michael Carrick, a club built on decades of institutional expectation now finds itself navigating a quieter, more unsettling kind of crisis: not catastrophe, but drift. The weekend trip to Fulham arrives not merely as a fixture, but as a reckoning.