Just watched that on about an hour’s delay, so I’m out of the loop of the hive mind tonight, but here’s a collection of thoughts.
I thought it was another dire performance overall. We look so poor away from home. Thankfully our next four are at home and five of our next six.
Sanchez put in his worst performance so far. His move has coincided with our worst period under Mourinho and he should no longer be in the XI. He’s not meshed with anyone so far and as an individual he is terribly out of form. His use of the ball and decision making was appalling tonight. He’s made our squad even more unbalanced and is an even narrower inside left than our other two, when we need width. This ain’t Udinese, this ain’t Arsenal, he needs to earn his place. We’ve got better alternatives right now.
I have stuck up for Pogba in recent weeks. I’ve not seen the player badly out of form that others have, but someone struggling with a bit of illness and under undue media focus. Forget that tonight, he was crap. To see our two dynamic, attack minded stars being our weakest links is a real concern as we were chasing the game for 79 minutes.
The manager has his work cut out to address the above, but while I was disappointed Rashford didn’t start tonight when I expected him to, it was good to see Mou be decisive to get us back in the game. Credit where it was due.
One final thing: we’re so fecking naive. That second goal was an embarrassment. It was like Leicester away all over again. What are our group of players doing standing around appealing for a ball crossing the goal line?! This ain’t fecking cricket. Lingard was caught out of position twice appealing for non-handballs. Mou would have eviscerated him if Palace had scored.
If you enjoyed that tonight, God bless you. I’m looking forward to not having to watch United on TV for a month.