United 1 - 1 Bournemouth

DDG

Valencia Jones Rojo Shaw(Lingard)

Carrick(Fellaini) Pogba

Mata Rooney(Rashford) Martial

Ibra

A draw at home against a side we should be beating easily. We've heard this before this season yet it keeps on happening. This was our 7th PL draw at home in the last 11 games. Such games are the reason why we're not challenging Chelsea up there. And today we can't say that Bournemouth just defended and had no intent to attack. They did attack and they left acres of space at the back but our forward players failed to put the ball in the net. Whenever we managed a decent shot, we found another inspired goalie having the game of his life. 

We started the game very well. Our players destroyed Bournemouth who looked all over the place. I thought it was a question of how many goals United were going to score. By the time Rojo scored i.e. the 23rd minute, we could have scored 4 goals and conceded 2. The game was that open. However, our strikers failed to put Bournemouth to the sword. 

Rooney looked very rusty inside the box. He missed a great chance to put us ahead inside the first couple of minutes and then overhit a pass inside the box in a 2 vs 1 situation. He did become better as he dropped deeper but he wasn't really offering anything special to the team. Ibrahimovic looked like he needed another day off after his heroics in the League Cup final. He did nothing noteworthy apart from missing a penalty (not a bad penalty, good save by Boruc) and elbowing Mings. Ibra should have been sent off today. Mings did something awful by stamping on Ibra's head but two wrongs don't make a right and Ibra's revenge was worthy of a straight red. What's most surprising is that what Zlatan did was in front of the ref's (and assistant ref's) eyes yet he only gave Zlatan a talking to.  The ref had a shocker today.

This incident also led to Surman being sent off for pushing Ibra and getting a second yellow card. Pushing a player is a yellow card but I cannot deny that our Swede made a meal of it but anyway I am not complaining. It took Kevin Friend 5 minutes to realise that he had booked Surman twice and that he had to be sent off. 

Anyway, Bournemouth had equalised before this incident when Phil Jones clumsily dived into a tackle in the box and conceded a penalty. Jones looked like he hadn't played in a while today, he didn't have the best of games. King scored the penalty and from then on I thought Bournemouth improved drastically and started to look like a unit and very difficult to break down.

It was great to see Luke Shaw back because I truly believe that boy has got ability. I thought he did well today. Valencia was probably our best player and Rojo looked much more composed than Jones. Carrick started brightly but faded as the game wore on and Pogba had a stinker. I lost count of the amount of passes he misplaced during the final 20 minutes and he also missed two decent chances right at the death. The guy looks too casual sometimes and I felt the OT crowd got a bit angry at him today. 

Martial and Mata had a decent game but I expected better balls into the box from the two. Also, I think we had one million corner kicks and we never really troubled the opposition in any of them. The delivery was poor even when we decided to go short. 

Anyway two points dropped and an opportunity to break into the top 4 (for a few hours) missed. It's been the pattern of our season really. Whenever we get a good run and our hopes up we drop points against a small side. Mind you, every game is difficult in the Premier League but we SHOULD be winning games like today's.

We're away to Rostov next and then Chelsea. Not expecting a lot from these games.