José Mourinho said Manchester United’s defenders should be “upset” with their attackers for not finishing off Anderlecht in the Europa League quarter-final first leg, the manager naming Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Marcus Rashford, Henrikh Mkhitaryan, Jesse Lingard and Anthony Martial as those culpable.
United led through Mkhitaryan’s 10th goal of the season after he struck on 37 minutes and, until Leander Dendoncker’s equaliser three minutes from time, Mourinho’s men were in charge. However, despite their superiority, they could not capitalise.
The manager said: “If I was a United defender I would be very upset with the attacking players because they have to kill the game and they didn’t. The result should be much better and we can only blame ourselves because we had an easy game to play in the second half and didn’t play in attack with that [killer] instinct.
“We lost the ball easily too many times, we stopped our counter attacks because of sloppy touches, sloppy decisions. And then we gave them the opportunity to have some counter attacks and luckily our defenders were very much in the game and they resolved all these problems.
“You have to play more seriously. We put all together the performance of two or three of our attacking players and you squeeze not much juice out of it and the people behind were not focused.”
Mourinho singled out the four front players who started plus Martial, a second-half substitute.
“Marcus Rashford, Jesse Lingard, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Anthony I think they were very similar [not doing enough],” the Portuguese said.
Michael Carrick echoed his manager. “It’s frustrating. We were so in control but got sloppy. We have to kill teams off. We should have won that game,” said the midfielder. “They had one chance and scored a header. We need to be more ruthless. It’s as simple as that.
“We were too comfortable. We got sloppy. It’s not the end of the world but we are better than that. It’s that little edge that makes the difference in the end but we’ll look forward to the next game. We’re still in a good position and hopefully we’ll go through.”
United do have an away goal before next week’s return leg at Old Trafford. “The result is positive. To play at home with an advantage, to start the game with an advantage, is a good result in any case,” said Mourinho. Before that , though, they have Chelsea at Old Trafford on Sunday.