Stretford End: United And You

Preview: Leicester City Vs Manchester United

26/07/2020

And here it is! Match Day 38! The final game of the season! A win or draw against Leicester City at the King Power Stadium could guarantee Manchester United a Champions League spot, something that we’ve been all dreaming of.

Manchester United’s Luke Shaw and Eric Bailly are doubtful while Phil Jones and Axel Tuanzebe continue to remain sidelined. The Foxes miss out on Ben Chilwell, Ricardo Pereira, Christian Fuchs, Daniel Amartey, and James Maddison through injury while Çağlar Söyüncü serves a three game suspension.

My Predicted line-up (4-3-3): De Gea leads from the back, the Spaniard still needs that one clean sheet to surpass Peter Schmeichel’s PL records of 112 clean sheets. At Left back I’m going to go with Luke Shaw if he’s fit or we could see Fosu-Mensah start instead of him. Center-backs include Harry Maguire and Victor Lindelöf while Aaron Wan-Bissaka continues at right-back.

I’m going to go with the same midfield three as last time of Paul Pogba, Bruno Fernandes and Nemanja Matic who’ll obviously play deep.

Marcus Rashford, Anthony Martial and Mason Greenwood complete an unchanged attack. Greenwood scored the equalizer against West Ham taking his tally to 17 goals in all competitions this season.

“Sometimes a wounded animal is more difficult to play against.” That quote from Solskjaer prior the Sheffield United game has kept ringing in my head for the past two nights. Leicester City miss out on several keys players but this game will be a bit different. The Foxes will give it their all to qualify for the Champions League while Jamie Vardy would love to win the Golden Boot and a goal or two against United could potentially lend it in his hands.
Manchester United definitely have an advantage over here but we need to lock horns in this game and I’s be disappointed if play five at the back or try to play from the back. Brandon Rodger’s men have only won 1 of their last 9 games at that victory came against Sheffield at home. Meanwhile United have won their last 3 away games scoring 8 times and conceding none.
Brandon Rodger’s will mostly go with a back three like he did in his last five games with Benett, Morgan and Evans. Ndidi and Tielemans will play a huge role in the middle of the park while Ayoze Perez, Jamie Vardy and Harvey Barnes will constantly try to take the game to David de Gea.
I personally want to us to win this game at all cost so that we can finish third and above Chelsea as I’m still bitter about the FA Cup exit. Our poor performances in our last few games have clearly been due to fatigue. Fernandes looked like he was completely empty and had nothing in the tank, so did Marcus Rashford. The players should be fully ready for today’s encounter though and I hope Luke Shaw is fit, the left back will assessed before the game.

Bits from Solskjaer’s press conference:
- How big a game the Leicester one is and what it would mean to be back in the CL? Looking forward to the game. We’ve given ourselves a good chance of being in the CL next year but that cannot go into that game and think what the outcome will be, we’ve just got to go and perform at a high level and get a result. We want to go there and dominate the game. We wanted to get to this position to be able to go to Leicester and beat them and we’re not going to change our approach. We’re going to try and go there and win the game.
- How important is focus and concentration on Sunday in terms of the other attributes the team has? Focus and concentration is very vital in football. When you play against quality teams, players, one lapse of concentration can hurt you. We’re going to go into it with a strong frame of mind it’s not job done. We’ve gotten to this point and we have one more game. Mentally we’ve shown more resilience, robustness when we concede the first goal for example but we’ve also shown the heights when everything is flowing but you can’t expect that every time so I’m delighted with how the development looks.
- How do players deal with this hectic period and any absentees? When you play football games and you win and you get good results it’s enjoyable. You build momentum and you’re going, you find one or two bumps along the way. It’s not going to in one straight linear projector and for us we’ve reacted well to some games being one-nil down, the last three at home actually. We’ve been a goal down and we’ve come back and got results in all of them which is very positive. We’ve enjoyed away games, of course we didn’t enjoy the game against Chelsea. The others (absentees) I’ll give them time to prove their fitness.
- Fitness and confidence levels with regards to last two games: Confidence levels have to be high as we’ve given ourselves a great chance going into the last game. You’d expect players in the last games of the season to have bruises, aches to be tired that happens naturally to every player even though this season is different.  It still has been a draining one for everyone but we still have enough for 90 minutes. Of course having been behind and then having to put in the points, the goals, it has been a great effort by everyone to get to this position. Now, it’s only one game to go.
- How much are you missing fans at games? I think the players have got used to this situation, and now we’ve just got to get on with it, the fans are a big difference both in home and away games. Football without the fans for me is not the same, it’s just a part of football. We are together, it should be with the fans, the enthusiasm, passion, the energy level, maybe we needed to go the extra mile Vs West Ham or to defend the last ditch Vs Southampton because our fans are the best. Old Trafford is no place to be chasing goals.
- Plans for the break before Europa league campaign: We’ll give them some time off, they need their mental and physical time away from the place because the effort has been fantastic. Recharge the batteries for a few days and then go again.
- G. Neville said that the squad need 3-4 players to challenge the league, do you agree with that There’s no point now discussing what we need foe next season, I don’t have time really for that to think about. Our main focus is to beat Leicester, the next challenge and hurdle for this squad.