Manchester United manager Louis van Gaal isn’t being drawn on the nature or extent of the injury sustained by Anthony Martial in the warmup ahead of the victory over Norwich City on Saturday.
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The likes of Marcus Rashford, Jesse Lingard and Memphis Depay have all experienced their first full season in the Premier League this season, and will all be expected to try and contribute to United’s attack in the remainder of the season.
He has always been mooted as a replacement for under-fire United boss Louis van Gaal, whose Old Trafford tenure could be coming to an end as the club looks set to miss out on Champions League qualification.
“Manchester United fans’ expectations are high, and they deserve to have that because we’ve been for many, many years at the top level of football”, he told The New Paper at The Westin yesterday. Now we are ready to start the last Premier League week of the season.
“Today was about winning”.
It has been a season of regression-with the pleasing distraction of the FA Cup aside-and Van Gaal should be embarrassed by how readily he has embraced United’s underachiever status. We have to play West Ham away now. “Fantastic, I think”, Van Gaal said.
“That (yesterday’s) game is a repeat of a our season”, said Norwich manager Neil.
Unitedwill now be heavily reliant on a few players to get the goals to pull United over the finish line.
In fact, the closest the visitors came to scoring in the first period was when Chris Smalling somehow headed Juan Mata’s right-wing corner over the bar from only three yards out just before the half-hour mark.
Meanwhile, the Canaries will be bemoaning a toothless performance against a Man United side who were lacking in quality, which leaves them just two more games to get themselves out of the relegation zone. “When you gift goals and make errors, it was not going to be enough”.
“It’s off the back of another mistake that has been quite commonplace for us this year”.
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In what was a drab encounter, with both teams lacking incisiveness in the final third, the Spaniard’s strike stood out as the one moment of real quality.
