Manchester United 1-1 Southampton (Sancho ’21, Adams ’48)
Jadon Sancho scored his first Premier League goal at Old Trafford as Manchester United but another fightback saw Southampton claim a point.
For the third successive game, Ralf Rangnick’s side went into the break 1-0 up but having failed to kill the game off, Che Adams made them pay three minutes into the second half as his shot sliced across David de Gea’s goal and bounced in off the far post.
United had started brightly and Sancho, brilliant in flashes against Burnley, finally delivered a deserved end-product on the counter-attack. It was a tap-in from Marcus Rashford’s cross that broke the deadlock, taking a touch off an in-sliding Kyle Walker-Peters on the way in.
Yet this is where the real test of Rangnick’s side comes in. The squandering of chances – Cristiano Ronaldo particularly guilty in the first half hour – let their opponents off the hook once again.
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That was indicative of another frantic, fearless display from Ralph Hasenhuttl’s men. In midweek, he described their 3-2 win over Tottenham in which they scored two goals in three minutes to turn the game on its head, as the best performance of his entire reign.
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On the back of it, United ought to have benefited from an additional 24 hours’ rest. Instead, the hosts tailed off again and lost momentum. Goals from Paul Pogba and Ronaldo were ruled out for offside (correctly), Southampton’s high line tricking a United front line that did their best to stretch them with pace but eventually ran out of ideas, summed up by Paul Pogba’s botched overhead kick.
Harry Maguire came closest to winning it in injury time, his header denied by the fingertips of Forster.
Ronaldo, meanwhile, failed to find the back of the net for the sixth successive game – he is in the midst of his longest run without a goal for more than a decade.
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Player ratings
Manchester United
- De Gea – 7
- Dalot – 6
- Varane – 6
- Maguire – 6
- Shaw – 5
- McTominay – 6
- Pogba – 7
- Rashford – 7
- Fernandes – 7
- Sancho – 7
- Ronaldo – 5
Substitutes:
- Elanga – 6
- Lingard – 6
Southampton
- Forster – 8
- Walker-Peters – 7
- Bednarek – 6
- Salisu – 7
- Perraud – 8
- Armstrong – 7
- Ward-Prowse – 7
- Romeu – 7
- Elyounoussi – 7
- Broja – 7
- Adams – 8
Substitutes:
- Stephens – 6
- Livramento – 6
Reaction
In the Sky Sports studio, Paul Scholes questioned United’s short-term appointment of Rangnick following Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s sacking. “One team have got a proper coach – the other have got a sporting director,” he said.
“That can’t be right at Manchester United.” Among his more scathing criticisms Scholes added: “You can see players don’t want to put a shift in for the club… I don’t think the players were working hard enough. There’s a lot of good players in that team – but with talent you have to work hard as well. I feel sorry for the manager because he’s clearly doing his best to set his team up and his players, they’re either listening and can’t do it, or they don’t want to do it”.
Adams, meanwhile, praised Southampton’s tireless pressing. “When everyone’s at it, we can beat anyone,” he said in his post-match interview.
“We’ve had a great week, it just keeps building and building. I’m delighted, it was a good performance. Personally it’s nice to be amongst the goals, but more importantly is the points on the board. I was half ready to go in for the rebound [for his goal] because I thought it was coming out. but I just had one thing on my mind – the far corner”.
The forward was singled out for praise from Hasenhuttl, who described his goal as “beautiful” and delighted in his “work for the team”.
“The first half wasn’t good,” the Southampton boss conceded. “We changed two times the shape. To play Wednesday night and Saturday lunchtime is super tough, especially against such a team… they had a better first half, we had a better second half, the draw we take it.”
Rangnick, meanwhile, insisted “the expected goal ratio was clearly in our favour” in the second half.
“Unfortunately again, very similar to the last couple of games, he said on Sky Sports. “Very good first half, we did all the things we intended to do, the counter attacks, runs – exactly that way we created the goal.
“But then we stopped doing that even at the end of the first half. In the second half we lost a bit of shape in the first 20 minutes and exactly that happened in transition when they scored their goal.”
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/at8UErW
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