Youri Tielemans hits out at Manchester United's performance in derby defeat

Youri Tielemans has pointed the finger at the Manchester United players (Picture: Getty Images)

Manchester United midfielder Youri Tielemans admitted his team’s performance in derby defeat to City was ‘sloppy’ and not good enough.

Refereeing decisions grabbed the headlines after the 1-0 win for Manchester City at Old Trafford on Sunday.

Phil Foden ’s red card on 23 minutes sparked debate, while the only goal of the game, scored by Erling Haaland , was extremely controversial.

Enzo Fernandez appeared to be clearly offside before Haaland scored, but the goal stood, only for Pro Ref to later accept that a mistake was admit that it should have been ruled out.

Manchester United will be left fuming with that call but Tielemans has accepted that his team did not do enough when they had a man advantage for such a long time.

‘First of all, we shouldn’t have conceded the goal, but if it doesn’t stand, it’s a different game,’ the summer signing from Aston Villa told NBC Sports.

‘I don’t think we created enough chances to win the game anyway. I thought we were a bit sloppy on the ball and maybe didn’t make the right decisions on the final ball.’

Tielemans accepts United were lacking against City (Picture: Shutterstock)

The Belgian added on MUTV: ‘It’s disappointing, everyone is disappointed and frustrated because we know we can play so much better.

‘We want to do things well, but today it didn’t happen like we wanted.

‘We didn’t use the right spaces, we made mistakes in our passes and maybe rushed it a bit too much. We didn’t make the right last pass in the final third to create enough chances to score.

‘The process is try to get our heads together and react in the next games, that’s the only thing we can do. We can analyse this game and see what didn’t happen, and do better in the next one.’

Michael Carrick has had a testing start to the season (Picture: Getty Images)

Red Devils boss Michael Carrick avoided criticising his own players, despite failing to score against a side with 10 men for over an hour.

‘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,’ he said. ‘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.

‘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.’

Phil Foden was dismissed after just 23 minutes (Picture: Shutterstock)

Gary Neville suggested that complacency set in when United gained the man advantage so early on.

He told Sky Sports: ‘I’d like to think that they’re not concentrating on the refereeing decisions and they’re focusing on the work they need to do to improve their performance. What you don’t want to do is give football players or anybody excuses.

‘They’ve got to go out there when they start training again and think about what happens if they go down to 10 men again.