An unfortunate trip to South London – A full review of United’s visit to Crystal Palace

United came away with a goalless draw against Crystal Palace on Saturday. But was it a fair result or did we get unlucky once again?

(Copyright: Imagine of Selhurst Park from Dreamstime)

I was really apprehensive before the game on Saturday, simply because of last year’s result. However, that wasn’t the case in the end. The game was the complete opposite, however once again this season, we failed to take our chances. Nevertheless, there has been a clear and significant improvement for the reds from last season in this fixture.

All in all, it was a really solid performance from us. We dominated possession and defended quite solidly the whole game, and you can’t complain about that at all. However, we can complain about missing big chances. So far this season, we are 3rd highest for xG* (expected goals) with 9.6. The only teams above us in this stat are Liverpool and City, which shows us only one thing. We need to take our chances.

It’s easy to complain constantly about the lack of end product and what we did wrong in the game, but we do have to look at how the game actually went. Dean Henderson had an absolutely outstanding game and one that we would only see from a prime David De Gea, and it would only come against us. (I’m convinced he’s never played that well in his life and never will again!) Also we have to give credit to Andre Onana who pulled off an amazing double save in the second half that once again must have been inspired by David De Gea.

I was really surprised not to see inform Marcus Rashford starting after his performances in the last two games. A week ago, I’d have said that the starting XI was absolutely spot on, however, without Rashford, I was very confused. Nevertheless, Amad and Garnacho were spot on the whole game. Garnacho was without a doubt our best player in the first half and every time he got on the ball, he looked like he was going to threaten the Palace defence.

There was only a few times in which Palace looked to threaten us on the attack, however they were either quickly dismantled by our defence or saved by Onana, which was very promising to see. It’s safe to say that the clean sheet was definitely well deserved. De Ligt put in another solid performance and it’s so pleasing to see we have absolutely found our Varane replacement.

There gets to only a certain point where we can classify our results as ‘unlucky’ and I think with this one we definitely can. It was nice to see the return of our new number 9 Rasmus Højlund and I can’t wait to see him get back into the swing of his goalscoring ways.

Our focus now will turn to Wednesday where we welcome FC Twente to the Theatre Of Dreams to kick off our Europa League campaign.

As always, don’t forget to contact us with your opinions of the game with the possibility of featuring in next week’s blog.

My MOTM: De Ligt

Biggest impact: Garnacho

*Expected goals measures the quality of chances by calculating the likelihood that it will be scored by using information on similar shots in the past. (theanalyst.com)