Manchester United registered their second successive comeback win in the Premier League to win against West Ham to move into top four with a game in hand. Finding themselves 1-0 down at half time, goals from Pogba, Greenwood and Rashford inspired a stunning comeback to seal a ninth away victory in a row in the Premier League. However, the former Manchester United defender Gary Neville believes United are too dependant on individuals to win games.
Speaking about the game on his podcast Neville said “It was an appalling first-half performance, I said shocking, abysmal, every adjective you could use, it was terrible, they were well off it. They were second to the ball, nothing in terms of possession, so scrappy, West Ham were far better but you knew if they didn’t get the second [goal] they were going to have a problem.
What Manchester United have is four or five match-winners, game-changers, that play in moments. My concern is for the longer-term because you need performances that knit together that look like an identity is building. I can’t quite see what they are yet. They can’t play without Bruno. I don’t know what it is, he’s a very good player but you’d think that Van de Beek and Pogba, McTominay in midfield with Greenwood, Cavani and Martial would be able to do so much better than that. The minute Bruno comes on – and Marcus Rashford as well who probably had a bigger impact yesterday – but Bruno’s impact on the team is huge. You can’t compare Bruno to Harry Kane but you know Kane has an influence on his team that’s bigger than just his performances, which are excellent.
Bruno is exactly the same with this Manchester United team and he’s only been there a short amount of time. As soon as he came on, they seemed more arrogant, more connected, more cohesive. I don’t know what it is when he doesn’t play.I can’t get excited. Manchester United, if you’d said to Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and the fans at the start of the season, they would be a couple of points off Liverpool, playing in a group with Paris Saint-Germain and Leipzig and need to go to Leipzig for a draw, in the quarter-finals of the Carabao Cup and the FA Cup hasn’t started yet, you’d say it’s a pretty good start to the season, it’s where I’d expect them to be. How they have got there is the bizarre bit.
You watch them in matches and you think ‘what’s that?’. They go to Turkey and they’re awful, then beat Leipzig 5-0 at home (the Leipzig win came first). It’s up and down, not even from game to game, it’s half to half. For 20 minutes they were brilliant but for large portions, it was below par. They have to be consistent but I’m not sure they can because there are players that play individually, they don’t knit together. With United, I’m still thinking ‘what kind of team are they?’. All I can describe them as at the moment is a team that wins games in moments of individual brilliance.”
Football is my antidote 
Couldn’t agree more! Bruno is a true winner and is the catalyst for the side. Ole cannot afford to not play him as the side has no other natural leaders. What happens when Bruno burns out?!?
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It’s not a good sign for a team to be too reliant on one player, especially with the busy schedule ahead. I agree with your point on burnout. Building a team around one player is different from being reliant on one player. Every player can have a bad day or run through a dry/rough patch, and things could go worse for United if that happens with Bruno.
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