Gary Neville
Gary Neville (Image: NBC)
Gary Neville has pulled on Manchester United’s weak running statistics as one reason why the team is struggling this season, following their 3-2 defeat to Nottingham Forest.
The result leaves the club languishing in 13th and six points off the top four, having previously gone down 2-0 at Arsenal on Wednesday. United have now lost six of their 15 Premier League games so far this term, with only five wins to show for their efforts.
Ahead of kick-off Ruben Amorim had bayed for his players to “run like dogs” during the match. Neville pointed to one statistic that he suggests the new head coach has a lot of work to do in that regard.
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“No good team is a good team without hard work,” he said while covering the game for American broadcasters NBC.
“Manchester United are 13th in the league and their running stats, distance covered, is 16th in the league. You don’t deserve anything if you’re being outrun every single week.”
Neville also pondered over Amorim’s decision to make five changes during the match, which included the removal of two of his back three defenders as well as captain Bruno Fernandes. He suggested United looked more fractured after the alterations.
Former United skipper Neville argued: “When you keep changing players and taking five players off, you’re basically [sending a message] to all of them effectively, because they've been left out at the start of the game because you don’t trust them.
“Erik ten Hag kept doing that a few weeks ago when he kept changing the back players and midfield. All of a sudden, you’ve got a completely different system and set of players on the pitch at the end of the game and you can never get stability or consistency.”
Neville continued: “Just leave the players on, they actually weren’t playing that bad in the first half. Obviously they were undermined by the set-pieces in terms of the corners but the football generally wasn’t that bad.
“Then you allow two mistakes after half time within the first 10 minutes to undermine you and then you make changes and all of a sudden everything falls to pieces. It looked really scruffy and a mess at the end with no real shape.”