Home England Premier League Neville: Fellaini let Mourinho down

Neville: Fellaini let Mourinho down

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The United legend criticised the Belgian for conceding a late penalty at Goodison Park to deny the Red Devils a draw

Gary Neville labelled the penalty Marouane Fellaini conceded against Everton as “idiotic” as Manchester United were forced to settle for a third consecutive league draw.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic gave the Red Devils a first-half lead at Goodison Park, before the Belgium midfielder came on and within minutes conceded a penalty to allow Leighton Baines to snatch a late point.

The result left the Red Devils nine points short of the top four, having drawn back-to-back home games in their previous two Premier League matches, against Arsenal and West Ham.

Despite United’s indifferent start to the campaign under Mourinho, Neville is refusing to blame the Portuguese for bringing the Belgian on and, ultimately, seeing him gift the home side a point.

“It [his introduction] was purely to deal with the long balls into the box.” said Neville.

“You can see the sense in it but when he goes on and does such an idiotic thing like that…

“It was really poor from an experienced international.

“It’s no reflection on the manager.

“He’s made the substitution for the right reasons and he has been let down by his player.”

It was a return to Everton for Fellaini, who spent five years with the Merseysides before moving to Old Trafford when former Toffees boss David Moyes took over the Red Devils in 2013.

1 COMMENT

  1. Neville is taking a very simple view of the incident. It was an extremely soft infraction for the referee to award and to give Fellaini a yellow card was idiotic by the referee. Perhaps it was a make-up call by the referee for not giving Rojos a red card for the two footed challenge in the first half. If the referee had made the right call then, I suspect Neville would have made Rojos the scapegoat. Commentators on the English League take a simple view without giving any meaningful insight. In the Chelsea Manchester City game, again the referee ruined the game by not making the right call when Luiz blocked off Aguero. I can think of a dozen more times when referees had a negative impact on a game this season. That’s not to suggest referees are corrupt or inept. The game is simply too fast for them. A simple solution used by other sports is to give each side the right to challenge a call or non-call. If managers could challenge up to three calls per game, the game would be better for it and the result would be the right outcome more often.

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