David Moyes and Manchester United need to start taking responsibility

More often than not this season, David Moyes has resembled Unlucky Alf from The Fast Show, lurching from one disaster to another without even the vaguest smattering of good fortune.

The golfer Gary Player once commented, “The more I practice, the luckier I get” and one has to wonder whether United’s position in the table is about more than simply the rub of the green. Just a few weeks ago, Moyes claimed he was “beginning to laugh at referees” and, following Saturday’s defeat at Stoke, the manager felt his side “could not have been more unlucky”.

Either Sir Alex Ferguson’s successor genuinely believes his team have been unfortunate, or he is distracting attention away from yet another poor performance. He said after the game, “I don’t know what we have to do to win” and yet it is not as though Asmir Begovic, in the Stoke goal, was required to produce a string of outstanding saves. Indeed, the home side had more shots on target than the visitors.

It is true Stoke’s opener took an almighty deflection that totally wrong-footed David de Gea and that injuries to Jonny Evans and Phil Jones early on meant Michael Carrick had to move to the centre of defence. Such setbacks rarely hampered United’s progress under Ferguson, though, his genius having usually been enough to overcome injury problems or refereeing mistakes. The great sides find a way to win however bleak the scenario. Instead, United sit in seventh place in the table and look utterly incapable of putting together a decent run of form. There is a reason the team were often characterised as lucky during the Fergie years and the Player quote offers the most succinct explanation.

Eight league defeats in 24 matches is entirely unacceptable for a club at which Champions League qualification has been a formality for almost two decades. There is every chance United could lose roughly a third of their league games this term and, given the fact that they are more than likely to finish the campaign without a trophy, Moyes and the players need to start shouldering some responsibility.

This is the club’s worst run in the top flight since the 1989/90 season, a campaign in which many supporters were calling for Ferguson’s head but which ended with an FA Cup triumph at Wembley. Moyes will be hoping he can turn things around in a similar manner and the first thing he ought to do is take luck out of the equation, since winners rarely bemoan a lack of it.