Mourinho working hard to restore Lindelof's confidence

Victor Lindelof has had a difficult start to life at Manchester United but has seen more regular playing time thanks to the injuries of other defenders.

His worst performance of the season came in United’s 2-1 defeat away to Huddersfield last weekend. For the first goal, he was turned inside out before Huddersfield scored, unable to keep up with the movement of their attacking players, before a feeble attempt at winning a header that lead up to Huddersfield’s second.

However, reports suggested after the game that while Mourinho let his frustration with the players and their poor attitude known, he spared Lindelof a grilling.

Our manager, who is famed for hanging out players out to dry in the media, defended Lindelof in his post-match interview.

Mistakes, yes. But I think mistakes can’t be isolated from the context and the context in the first half was a context that opened the door for mistakes to come. So I would be very unfair if I point the finger at the players involved in individual mistakes that lead to the goal.

I could, I should, I would probably if it was isolated from the context of a great team. ‘But it wasn’t, it was exactly the consequence of what we were in the first half – a bad team who deserved to be punished.

Mourinho threw Lindelof straight back in to the action on Tuesday night’s win over Swansea in the EFL Cup. The defender still looked shaky but had the support of two other central defenders.

I decided to play with three because Victor was not coming with his confidence levels very, very high.It was good for the players to get confidence.

With so few appearances in the Premier League under his belt, it would be unfair to dismiss Lindelof already, and the manager is doing all he can to help the player settle.