Shearer Says: “Arsenal just weren’t good enough against Man United.”

Premier League legend reviews United’s 3-1 win

It was quite simple summing up what went wrong for Arsenal against Manchester United last Saturday.

If you concede three goals at home and have numerous chances but only score once, then that means that your defenders haven’t played well and your forwards haven’t played well enough either.

Arsenal had a lot of possession but if you don’t put the ball in the back of the net and you concede three goals at home then that’s going to be a big issue.

Game plan

Everybody knew how Manchester United would play. They got two early goals through poor mistakes from Arsenal, although they finished them off brilliantly, and Mourinho’s game plan worked a treat.

De Gea is part of the defence and he and his fellow defenders faced 33 shots.

Not too many of them were clear cut, but if you face those shots and only concede one it means that they must have defended well, and for the forwards to score three goals they also must have played well. 

Manchester United punished Arsenal’s mistakes, Arsenal made terrible defensive errors and did nothing with their possession – we all saw the end result.

Lingard or De Gea?

I wasn’t surprised that David De Gea wasn’t given man of the match.

Jesse Lingard scored two goals and attacking players win games.

De Gea was brilliant but where as he may have saved the game, Lingard won it, so for me he was a worthy man of the match. 

That was what I saw and that was how I called it. I’d still say exactly the same now.

Differing opinions

Everybody is entitled to their opinion but people seem to want to get angry about it.

We have been accused of being biased but unfortunately whenever we say anything negative about a side, some supporters seem incapable of accepting that criticism is not bias.

And yet they never accuse us of being bias against a team they don’t support. Strange eh?

I’m a Newcastle supporter but if they play poorly, I will say that they played poorly.

I always try to tell it how it is and to me it wasn’t rocket science to say that Arsenal overall were poor against a very good Manchester United on Saturday.

I haven’t got a problem with people having an opinion because that is what football is all about but when it gets nasty and you get death threats to your family on Twitter that’s when it becomes unacceptable. 

Is that the world we live in now, or is just the world of social media? I hope it’s only the latter.

Alan