Gary Neville condemns ‘embarrassing and complacent’ Man United after Everton defeat

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Ruben Amorim’s United played 77 minutes against 10 men following Idrissa Gueye’s sending off for slapping a team-mate but they still lost 1-0

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Gary Neville has lambasted Manchester United following their 1-0 defeat to Everton, calling the result an embarrassment and suggesting they were undone by their own complacency.

United headed into the Monday night contest at Old Trafford riding something of a crest of a wave after going five matches unbeaten, as morale-boosting wins over Sunderland, Liverpool and Brighton were allied with draws against Nottingham Forest and Tottenham.

And things appeared to going the way of Ruben Amorim’s side once more when Idrissa Gueye was sent off after just 13 minutes for slapping his own Everton team-mate Michael Keane.

However, United wilted from there as a brilliant Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall strike gave the Toffees the lead on the half-hour mark and the visitors held on to that advantage for the remainder of the game, with the hosts struggling to create much of note.

And former United defender Neville didn’t hold back in his criticism of his former side – slating their approach to the game and the way they singularly failed to bother their 10-man opponents.

“It was nowhere near good enough,” Neville said in his role as a pundit on Sky Sports. “That was a really bad night for Manchester United, it was an embarrassment at times.

“Forget [the injuries to Benjamin Sesko and Matheus Cunha], there are no excuses. I’m not entertaining that one bit. Everton dominated them with 11 men and with 10 men, in a different way of domination, but they dominated them through their fight and their spirit.

“It’s complacency, and complacency will kill you. The minute that you think as a football player that you just have to turn up on that pitch and you’re Manchester United and you can play or any football club, you’re done.”

Neville expanded on the complacency theme in his Gary Neville Podcast, while also suggesting that the result would erode trust in what Amorim is trying to achieve – just after he finally appeared to make a breakthrough over the past few games.

Victory by three goals would have seen United jump up into the Premier League top four, truly putting a slow start to the season behind them.

“It’s as if they’ve imagined in their heads they’re going to be in the Champions League places, and they thought that maybe before the game,” added Neville.

“It just smelt of complacency. They weren’t at it from the beginning. That is a bad one for United. I think they’ve been a lot better in the last few weeks. That probably takes us back to Brentford away.

“You can’t go from the fight that they showed in certain games to that. It just erodes confidence, it erodes trust. We’re trying to build a trust in a manager, we’re trying to build a trust in a team.

“The fans booed collectively at the end. It was loud, and rightly so. That was a really poor performance. It’s almost as if you’ve gone sort of like two or three steps forward, everyone’s feeling a little bit better about themselves, and you’ve just gone back to the start again.

“You can lose football matches, but you can’t lose them like that. That’s nowhere near good enough, it’s not acceptable.”

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