Man United were held to a 1-1 draw by Burnley in the Premier League on Tuesday and the two dropped points mean the Old Trafford outfit have fallen out of the top-four.
Ralf Rangnick’s side were expected to pick up an easy win since they had a wonderful record at Turf Moor and currently Burnley are the 20th team on the table, picking up only one win so far. But this game was a complete replica of the Boro game.
Despite getting numerous chances in the first half, Man United managed to score only one goal in the first 45 minutes and this gave Burnley the chance to come back into the match. United had two goals disallowed in the first half and throughout the game, they have as many as 22 shots.
Despite being so dominant, Manchester United failed to pick up a win and speaking after the game, Ralf Rangnick gave a proper dissection as to why his side conceded the goal and what are his players doing wrong.
“[There were] not that many things that we could have done better in the first half,” the boss told MUTV post-match, as quoted.
Jadon Sancho keeps looking better in the Manchester United shirt 📈 pic.twitter.com/1F2fxskgYv
— GOAL (@goal) February 9, 2022
“We scored three goals, two of them disallowed. Especially the second one, nobody can really understand it was disallowed, and why the linesman flagged a foul from Paul Pogba eight seconds after the foul, if there was a foul committed. Anyway, we should have been at least 2-0 up at half-time.
“The second half we didn’t start well, we were not aggressive enough, we were not composed enough on the ball.
“Even the two minutes before we conceded the goal, three times we had won the ball and played tiki-taka football in our own half and gave away the ball too easily.
“Then we had our own counterattack, 20 seconds before we scored. The behaviour of our team in those 10 seconds before they scored was just not good enough. We had two or three players in our own half but still allowed them to score the goal.”
Why can’t the Man United manager solve the pertaining issue?
This is not the first time Ralf Rangnick has explained what went wrong since he gave a similar interview after the Boro game as well.
But despite knowing what to do, the interim boss cannot seem to work out a way to solve the issue.
We have a feeling the German has somewhat managed to sort out his tactics at the club. He was really quick to ditch his favoured 4-2-2-2 system and adopt a 4-2-3-1 formation.
It’s actually the attacking players who cannot seem to be clinical despite getting so many chances.
So #MUFC have now ended CR7’s scoring ability. Cristiano Ronaldo has not scored in his last five games. This is his worst goal scoring drought since 2010. #ManUtd pic.twitter.com/shThy5jAA2
— Zubin Daver (@zubinofficial) February 9, 2022
Players like Ronaldo and Cavani need to find their rhythm as soon as possible or else they will have to play in the Europa League next season. Jadon Sancho has upped his game and even Pogba has had two stable performances but the goals have to come from players like Ronaldo and Cavani.
Rashford has also been really poor this season and his confidence is so low that more often than not, he ends up making the wrong decision in the final third.
The only thing Ralf Rangnick can do is to talk to these players during training sessions but apart from that, there’s not much the German can help with. The defence is unstable but that can’t be fixed immediately so the forwards will need to step up and ensure they break their opponents by scoring more than two or three goals every game.
