Manchester United suffered a hugely disappointing 1-0 defeat at the hands of Aston Villa on Saturday afternoon. The fact Ollie Watkins was impeding David de Gea, in an offside position, meaning VAR should have ruled out the only goal of the game, does little to excuse United not finding the back of the net themselves.

With close to 30 shots over the 90 minutes, we failed to score at home for the second game running, although the most painful miss of the lot was obviously Bruno Fernandes’ injury time penalty. Having become so reliable from the spot, he changed his usual calm technique and leathered the ball as hard as he could and watched it fly over the bar. Mike Dean had allowed the Villa players to surround Bruno and that possibly got in to his head, but it really was a poor penalty.

As soon as he missed, the Stretford End quickly responded by chanting his name, and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer has insisted that Fernandes will continue to take penalties for United.

That’s football. He’ll step forward every day of the week for the club and the team. Sometimes it just doesn’t go your way. That is part and parcel of it. It is such a fine line between heaven and hell and unfortunately today he missed. But you know Bruno has been excellent. He is such a good penalty taker and today you’d back him with your mortgage, I would guess.

What I didn’t enjoy and didn’t like was the way they crowded the referee around the penalty spot and tried to affect Bruno. It clearly worked for them but that’s not great to see but they achieved what they needed to.

There were questions over whether new signing Cristiano Ronaldo should be on penalty duty, while Ole insisted we’re lucky to have two great penalty takers at the club.

Bruno has been excellent and Cristiano is probably the one that has scored the most penalties in England before. We have got great takers here but it is just a missed opportunity for us to get a point.




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