United skipper did not hold back his words, claiming that the result is "disappointing" and the squad is "devastated" with the demoralising defeat.
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Harry Maguire gave an honest assessment of Manchester United’s performance against their city rivals Manchester City in the derby defeat on Sunday. The one-sided Premier League clash finished with Pep Guardiola’s side winning 4-1. Manchester United gave their neighbours a tough fight in the first half despite trailing 2-1 at the break. But, United were blown away by a dominant City side in the second half. United skipper did not hold back his words, claiming that the result is “disappointing” and the squad is “devastated” with the demoralising defeat. However, he now wants the attention to be shifted to the upcoming games, starting with Tottenham Hotspur.
“We know it’s an important end to the season that we’ve got. It’s a run of games where we know that we’ve got to go on a run, we’ve got to go and pick up win after win after win and we’re more than capable of doing it but we’ve got to show it on the pitch, we’ve got to show it every game that we go into, take each game as it comes, a big game against Tottenham next. We’ve got to make sure that we focus this week. I know it’s going to be a disappointing couple of days, it always is when you lose one of these big, emotional games. The lads are devastated in there. We’ll obviously analyse the game, look at areas we can improve on but when we come to Tottenham, we’ve got to make sure that we’re ready to give a performance and ready to get the result that we want,” he added.
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Maguire then went on to explain how the team competed well in the first half but where it all went wrong in the second period. “It’s a disappointing result for the players, for the club, for the fans, for everyone involved. We come into these games full of emotion, we give everything, we work tirelessly in the preparation, we look forward to the games and we had great belief that we could get the result,” he explained.
He added: “So, first and foremost, it’s very disappointing that we’ve come here and got the result that we did. The game was 50-50 first half. [It was] very disappointing to go in 2-1 down, I felt like the game was probably edged towards ourselves and we could have gone in with a positive result. But 2-1 down, and we could take the positives into the second half and we’ve come out and we haven’t performed in the second half.”
“We haven’t done things that we did in the first half well, and for me, the main thing was, when we had the ball, we just gave it back to them far too cheaply, far too easily, we weren’t clean enough with our passing. And in moments where we did have chances to hurt them we weren’t clinical enough, we weren’t clean enough with the passing and the transitional moments in the game, especially in the second half. We gave away the ball far too easily and we know that they like to control the game through possession and they did that in the second half.”
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