Ruben Amorim has had plenty of set-piece disasters to analyse with his staff over the time he has been at Old Trafford, but this one was a belter.

It was Soungoutou Magassa who finished calmly to give West Ham United a deserved share of the spoils, but the chance came after Noussair Mazraoui had been forced to make a goal-line clearance because a visiting player had towered above the home defence to power in a header from a corner.

And that player? The colossus that is Jarrod Bowen.

Amorim’s team - and Amorim’s defence - really do keep finding new ways of tossing away winning opportunities. Not that this was an overall performance that merited a victory. It was a performance that was sluggish from the outset.

Young Ayden Heaven set the tone, collecting a yellow card for a woefully mistimed slide towards Bowen and then giving a fiendishly fierce back-pass to Senne Lammens, who duly sliced it out of bounds.

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But Heaven’s hesitancy was typical of Manchester United’s early efforts. Their lack of intensity was hard to fathom, and a quarter of the match had elapsed before the home side forced their first corner.

That sparked a brief spell of pressure which featured a Joshua Zirkzee effort being cleared off the line by Aaron Wan-Bissaka, but Nuno Espirito Santo’s team rarely looked in any danger in a first half when the most animated aspect of the home performance was Bruno Fernandes’ ongoing beef with referee Andrew Kitchen, taking charge of a Manchester United match for the first time.

There was no danger of Kitchen being unable to keep up with play - it was strictly pedestrian stuff. And that suited West Ham, who, in Bowen, had the game’s most accomplished player.

But this is a West Ham line-up that looks short of confidence, and there was a sense that Ruben Amorim’s men only had to step up a gear to get some joy out of the night. They ended the first half relatively strongly, which made a laborious opening to the second period even more surprising.

There has been quite a lot of talk this season about the general standard of Premier League football and it is fair to say this was pretty grim evidence that it is most definitely not at a vintage level. It was untidy, it was dotted with clumsy fouls, scarred with some seriously poor passing.

That Manchester United have a very realistic chance of finishing in a top-four position is a bit of an indictment of the overall quality of the competition. They did not deserve to win this contest but Diogo Dalot deserved to score his first Premier League goal at Old Trafford and his first Premier League goal anywhere in 18 months.

His smart turn and finish came just before the hour mark after a miscued Casemiro shot had landed at his feet just inside the penalty area. That should have been the platform for a Manchester United win, but West Ham showed great resolve and no little creativity and carved out a couple of half-chances before Magassa’s composure earned them a valuable point.

There were a smattering of jeers after the full-time whistle but, like Manchester United’s attempts to avoid another disappointing finale to a game, they were strictly half-hearted.

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