Former Manchester United star Robin van Persie was clearly unimpressed with Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s post-match interview after the club’s latest defeat away to Newcastle.
The Red Devils’ awful start to the season continued as Matty Longstaff hit a second-half winner at St James’ Park yesterday to seal a 1-0 victory for Steve Bruce’s side.
United were poor throughout the game, failing to score once again as they did in their midweek Europa League draw with AZ Alkmaar.
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It remains to be seen if Solskjaer can lift Man Utd out of this mess, but it’s starting to look like the Norwegian really is out of his depth in such a big job.
Van Persie analysed his post-match comments during punditry duty with Optus Sport and was heavily critical of the way he responded to the result.
The Dutchman played for United between 2012 and 2015, spending one season under the legendary Sir Alex Ferguson, and also spent many years at Arsenal under Arsene Wenger, so you’d think he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to managers and the messages they send to their players.
“You can see here’s struggling there, if I’m really honest, during that interview,” Van Persie told Optus Sport, as quoted by the Metro.
“And I get it if you’re manager of Manchester United during this period of time. So he’s searching for words, maybe he chose a few wrong ones there, because as a player, what does that mean, ‘sorting the players’ heads out’, what does that mean?
“If you’re a player you’re a little bit like, ‘my head is fine’. Even though you can see the players are low in confidence, he needs to find a way to reconnect again and to get their confidence high.
“As a manager, when you’re team is low in confidence get them up, when your team is too high in confidence, when they are becoming a little bit too much, you have to get them back to the middle again.
“At the moment, based on this interview, and based on what I’ve seen in the game, I’m not sure if he really knows how to find the buttons there.”