Everyone is entitled to their opinion. However regarding Mourinho's tactics it was evident for all to see that the long ball over the top didn't work . We tried it on over 30 occasions and lost the ball to City each time. It only worked on the equaliser by fluke as Delph misjudged the ball and even that was dissimilar to the rest as it was within City's own half.
Regarding Mata, he is similar in style to Silva (albeit not as good granted). Nonetheless Silva is not expected to track back to the same degree as the rest and we should have used Mata in a similar fashion (to find a through ball). We needed creativity but both Matic & Herrera were bereft of attacking prowess, something Mata would have addressed.
As outlined with the exception of De Bruyne & Silva, show me a position where City are stronger indiviually than us? Had Pogba played he would be our nearest player to match De Bruyne in terms of vision and passing ability.
Given our players are as good as City on a man for man basis, the difference is clearly formation, tactics & the manager's motivational ability to obtain the best from his players.
It might be easy for us United fans to think that the City front line and the United front line are equal in quality, but that's definitely not the case.
The player who has always scored against us, one of the best strikers in the league, Aguero was on the bench! Do you think if Aguero was a United player and was fit and available, he'd be on the bench on Sunday??
Also, we can rave all we want about Rashford and Martial (and rightly so in the case of Martial), but Sterling and Sane have worked extremely well in Pep's set-up and so has Jesus.
Rashford was playing on the right and was thus less effective. Lukaku...well..was being Lukaku. Definitely not United quality. And Martial decided to take the day off. Along with them we had Lingard, and despite his performances in a few (two) games recently, he's always considered a squad player at best.
Apart from having Pogba unavailable, we suffered badly from not starting Mata to link up play, from Mkhitaryan being out of form and out of favor and also, to a certain extent, Fellaini who would've been a good asset at breaking up play in the midfield.
We are a class below City in terms of squad quality and depth and it showed. Glaringly.
Yes, the tactics were out-of-place too. Mourinho probably decided to take the day off as well.
I don't know how much longer we have to wait to be able to stand up to City and destroy them. At least at home.
We have been relegated to being the noisy neighbors since the departure of Fergie.