The ignominy of Manchester United’s season continued last night after they fell to a 2-1 loss away to Danish side FC Midtjylland. Memphis Depay opened the scoring for the visitors, but Pione Sisto scored just before half-time to restore parity. Paul Onuachu struck in the 77th minute for the hosts to consign the Red Devils to another damaging loss, although the tie is still alive, especially since Manchester United scored an away goal.
Here’s how various pundits, the managers and players reacted after the loss:
With Twitter in an uproar over United’s loss, the social network was filled with calls for Louis van Gaal to be sacked. The Dutchman, however, blamed ‘the law of Murphy’ for the loss in his post-match comments, saying "It is the law of Murphy. When you start the game and your goalkeeper is [injury] number 14, you're not starting like usual. A lot of things are happening in the heads of the players. The first 10 or 15 minutes were not so good but after that we came into the match, scored and could have scored more."
"But then it's too much. The second half, we don't win any duels, any second ball. You cannot afford a second goal, but we could have scored also - Jesse Lingard had two remarkable chances. It is the law of Murphy, I think."
"I think that, in certain phases, we were not organised. But that happens when you play with another team every week. It is always possible in football but we have the chance to beat them at home and we have to do that."
Manchester United midfielder Michael Carrick endured a torrid night in midfield, although the midfielder was first to acknowledge the paucity in the quality of United’s performance, saying “The performance and the result are just not good enough. It’s got to be a lot better.”
“I think we caused a lot of our own problems. We scored a good goal and then it's just not good enough, we haven't played well enough, we didn't really kick on. They were there for us to win the game, we should have won that. With a performance and a result like that we're going home very disappointed.”
“That's the only positive, we've got another chance to put it right and to go through. Of course it’s not going to be easy but playing at home we still fancy our chances. Obviously, we've given ourselves a tougher job than we had hoped.”
“Of course, we've got to give everything we can - we want to stay in this and go further in this competition and get some sort of belief and momentum back – get back to winning games.”
The man of the moment, Paul Onuachu, who scored the winner for FC Midtjylland last night, also echoed Carrick’s comments, saying “I think I expected more from them but we gave them what they didn't expect. We gave our best and got the result.”
“I'm looking forward to the return leg, hopefully we're going to get something. We've come out as the Danish champions, we beat Southampton and we'll give it our best against United. Hopefully we will [win], we just have to be positive. It won't be easy but we'll give our best.”
Of course, the mood amongst the United faithful could be best summed up by Rio Ferdinand’s tweet:
TV Pundits Gary Lineker and Stan Collymore were left shocked by United’s performance, as they tweeted:
