Manchester United boss Michael Carrick has praised his side’s attacking product, which he insisted was on show yet again despite the loss to Manchester City.
Erling Haaland found the back of the net in the 60th minute to hand United their second loss of the 2026/27 Premier League season.
City, who played most of the game with 10 men after Phil Foden was given his marching orders for kicking out at Bruno Fernandes, had the goal initially ruled out, with Haaland deemed to be offside. But VAR intervened and bizarrely judged that Enzo Fernandez was not affecting play.
Replays clearly showed that the Argentina midfielder made an attempt to head the ball before Haaland tapped home.
Carrick is not dwelling on it, having been furious when speaking to Sky Sports before taking a cooler tone in his press conference.
A disappointing afternoon but we can't thank you enough for your support.
We'll dust ourselves down and go again on Wednesday 👊 pic.twitter.com/bhXWqvjXhb
— Manchester United (@ManUtd) September 13, 2026
Moving on
He told reporters, “We’ve got two games coming up this week and it’s part of it, of moving on quickly. We haven’t got as many points as we would have liked at this point, for sure, there’s no getting away from that.”
“But we don’t need a break or a restart or anything, we’ve just got to move on and get winning again.”
He said about his team’s attacking edge, “To be fair, in terms of creation and scoring goals, that’s something I think in all the games we’ve won here we’ve scored at least two goals. We’ve lost one game [1-2 v Leeds last season] and we scored in that game, so it’s the first time [today we haven’t scored].”
“I think there’s certainly a bit of context in that as well, and for whatever reason, at some point you have a game when we haven’t scored. So, I can’t be too critical of the players because I think we’ve got some really good creative players who have scored and created goals a lot.”
“So, I think when we look at it as an isolated game, of course we would hope for more in general from the team and we certainly wanted to score a goal and we didn’t today.”
Controversial goal
Asked about Haaland’s strike, Carrick remarked, “I thought we had a fair bit of the initiative, especially second half, coming out second half before they scored, I thought we were better. I thought we could improve on the second half of the first half.”
“I thought we came out after half-time and built momentum, hit the post and the game was building the way we wanted it to at that point. Then the goal obviously has a big impact.”
“We could have finished the game better, we could have been a little bit more creative. We could have finished the game better, for sure. But yeah, I thought we’d started the second half okay.”
“Yeah [the decision to award the goal impacted us], but it is part of the game and you’ve got to react and you’ve got to manage that. So there is part of that, but it did have a major impact for sure.”
United are next in action on Wednesday when they face Brighton & Hove Albion in the third round of the EFL Cup.
Featured image by Carl Recine via Getty Images
