David de Gea – Distribution was average. Couldn’t do anything about either goal. 6/10
Phil Jones – Did ok until his injury. However shown once again that centre-backs can’t play right-back as they have no natural width. 5/10
Jonny Evans – Not enough time to mark.
Chris Smalling – Started off very poorly, but got better as the game went on. Dealt with crosses well. 6/10
Patrice Evra – Struggled positionally when defending. Looked great going forward. Pretty much sums up his season. 5/10
Michael Carrick – Could’ve done better for the first goal. Did ok at centre-back when he was moved back there to be fair. 5/10
Tom Cleverley – Poor yet again. Couldn’t pick a pass, couldn’t find himself in space, couldn’t do anything productive. 3/10
Ashley Young – Went back to his below-average best today. Couldn’t do anything right. 2/10
Wayne Rooney – An odd performance from Wayne. He went from spectacular to shoddy, back to spectacular again. Looked decent in midfield. 5/10
Juan Mata – Our best player by quite some distance. He grabbed an assist for Robin’s goal, and created quite a few chances. 7/10
Robin van Persie – Took his goal well. Held up the ball well. Didn’t last 90 minutes due to only recently coming back from injury. 6/10
Subs:
Rafael – Did well after coming on. Bombed forward and whipped a few decent crosses in. 6/10
Danny Welbeck – Could’ve contributed more, but Moyes sticking him out wide didn’t help. 5/10
Javier Hernandez – Not enough time to mark.
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Too generous. Welbeck looked out of his depth, 3. Chris Smalling is slow and positionally suspect. Not United quality, 3. Ashley Young is out of his depth for large parts of the game, 3.
You also don’t score the manager. Try David Moyes, 4. He gets 3 of those for playing Mata. United were not unlucky, they were slap-dash, set up wrong and substitutes choices were piss poor. Tie this in with a totally predictable and slow game plan with substitutes unable to introduce any alternative threats.
I accept that United were unlucky to lose both centre halves, but here we have an overall defence that is so fragile that even had we lost no one, it still would have been suspect at best. Why ffs was Welbeck chosen ahead of Fletcher when Jones was stretchered off?