Jose Mourinho has lashed out at the performances of the officials and his players as Manchester United suffered a third successive defeat with a 3-1 Premier League loss at Watford.
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United’s latest setback follows a 2-1 home defeat by Guardiola’s City in the Manchester derby and a 1-0 loss at Feyenoord in their first Europa League group stage game.
Watford’s other goals from Juan Zuniga in the 83rd minute and a late Troy Deeney penalty owed more to poor defending after Marcus Rashford had equalised just past the hour mark.
Mourinho has lost three consecutive games in a season for the first time since February 2002, when he was Porto boss.
It was the first time United had lost three in a row since the unlamented Louis van Gaal presided over four successive defeats in December previous year.
Paul Pogba has told Manchester United fans the team will “continue fighting” after their miserable week ended with defeat at Watford on Sunday lunchtime.
United now find themselves down in seventh place in the Premier League table and are already six points adrift of leaders Manchester City.
“I was completely aware that we were not the flawless team, that we had lots of players who are not end products and can make their own mistakes”, Mourinho said.
“I’m always concerned when we don’t get the result we want so that’s an obvious situation”, he said. “We should take a bit more credit, we pressed well, condensed the space and were tough in the tackle”, said Deeney. That second goal is an individual mistake because we know we have to press the wing-backs outside the box and not let them take the advantage of being one against one inside the box. But was I thinking that my team was ready, perfect, unbeatable?
Mourinho made five changes to the team that had lost in Rotterdam, with Antonio Valencia, Luke Shaw, Marouane Fellaini, Wayne Rooney and Zlatan Ibrahimovic coming in.
A key intervention by Miguel Britos created Watford’s goal.
“The only thing we can control is our individual mistakes and our collective mistakes”.
There was an element of mystery over why Sunderland defender Patrick van Aanholt never even started the game, having been removed from the starting lineup during the warmup and replaced by Jason Denayer. If we had drawn I would have said: “‘OK, ‘ but to lose and not deserve to is a bad feeling”.
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The coach added: “We need positive people to give us positive feelings because obviously the next time these guys are going on to a football pitch they are – as a normal human being – going to obviously feel the weight of the defeat”.
