Paul Pogba had one of the worst games of his career for Manchester United vs. Liverpool

Despite Manchester United coming back for a 1-1 draw in their match against archrivals Liverpool on Sunday, that was not a match Paul Pogba will want to remember. The French midfielder started the match well, but a disastrous handball penalty that gave Liverpool the lead knocked him out of sorts and basically took him out of the game, leaving Manchester in a huge hole for the majority of a crucial match.

This performance comes in the wake of Pogba being decidedly unimpressive at Anfield when these two teams played earlier in the season, looking more like a passenger than a core player. He’s been in monstrously good form of late, though, putting Manchester on his back and propelling them to eight straight wins in games he’s played in. During that run, he’s been far and away their best player.

That led to increased expectations in Pogba from United and their fans, including ad campaigns leading up to this game declaring that Pogba would lead them to victory and forever establish himself as a dominant force in the sport. United’s PR team might have went a little too far by purchasing a #Pogba hashtag campaign, complete with a custom emoji on Twitter, and promoting it at Old Trafford.

This went poorly. Perhaps it was that pressure, perhaps it was a bad matchup, or perhaps it was just plain bad luck. But what actually happened was anything but Pogba putting on a dominant performance.

Pogba started the match playing absolutely fantastic football, flying around the pitch. Not just to create chances and drive play for Manchester United, but also to snuff out Liverpool’s attempts to drive forward whenever United’s rivals started getting some time on the ball. For the first 25 minutes of the match, it looked like this could wind up being the best of his recent good performances.

Then disaster struck in the form of Pogba being whistled for an unfortunate handball in the box to give up a penalty, setting up Liverpool for an unlikely lead on 27 minutes after coming up short in the run of play in the opening spell of the game. Pogba reacted badly to the penalty in the moment, getting visibly upset with himself over it. Normally, that’s fine — feeling bad about that kind of situation is pretty standard.

But Pogba’s bad feelings didn’t stop there, because giving up that penalty threw him all out of sorts, leaving him unbalanced and pressing too hard to try to find an answer. Pogba was pushing passes too far, getting caught out on the ball over and over, losing out on challenges he would normally win easily — in fact, he won less than half the challenges he was involved in, just seven of 18 — and flat-out making the wrong runs. Pogba couldn’t even get a shot on frame, and the one big scoring chance he was a part of, he completely messed up. It got to the point that Jose Mourinho was forced to put on Wayne Rooney at halftime to take over creative duties, but even that relief of pressure didn’t do anything to improve Pogba’s performance. He finished the match completing just 72 percent of his passes, with none of the successful ones leading to shots. He was also dispossessed three times and made no interceptions.

It was a bizarrely poor performance from Pogba. Even when he’s out of form, he usually does the little things right. But he was so out of sorts after giving up that handball, he appeared to get lost in his own head and hurt his team. United rely on Pogba as both an outlet and a driving force, and on Sunday he was such a negative influence that it left them scrambling for answers from that handball on.

Fortunately for United, they were able to find an equalizer despite Pogba’s poor performance. But Pogba could probably use a day off to get his head screwed back on straight because United need him back in form, fast.