Ahead of their midweek meeting with Everton, Jose Mourinho has called on his Manchester United side to be more aggressive in front of goal.
Saturday’s goalless draw with West Brom saw the Red Devils lose ground to rivals in the hunt for a top four place and Champions League football next season.
While they extended their unbeaten league run to nineteen games, too many draws at Old Trafford have seen United facing a five-point gap to fourth place.
Mourinho is assertive in his opinion that United need to start ‘killing off’ opponents in front of goal.
“We need to kill opponents off and this is déjà vu all season. When you score a goal against these teams, you don’t win 1-0, you win 3-0 or 4-0 because, when you score, the game is open and you have a completely different story because then they have to play a different way.” Mourinho told manutd.com.
“We are not consistent with this, we miss easy chances, we have moments or periods where we push but then a couple of players disappear and there is 10 minutes when you don’t see them. You see always the same people, always the same guys in front of the train, pulling the train. So it’s disappointing, yes, because it’s one more draw. It’s an amazing unbeaten run though – 19 matches in the modern-day Premier League, it’s fantastic, but we’ve had too many draws at home. Some draws away from home are very acceptable or positive and we can deal with it, but too many draws at home.
“The number of goals we score at home probably if someone who doesn’t know looks at them they may think we are a defensive team, we are a counter-attacking team waiting for a mistake, that we don’t push, we don’t control things and we don’t have a mission and that’s completely the opposite.
“But you see how many goals our guys score – [Marcus] Rashford, [Jesse] Lingard, [Henrikh] Mkhitaryan, [Anthony] Martial – you see how many goals they score and then Zlatan [Ibrahimovic] and [Juan] Mata are the ones with more goals. Zlatan, for sure, and I think Mata will come after him. If they are not [playing], then the situation gets even more difficult.”
By Steve Osborne @BlizzardSteve75
