Paul Scholes slammed Manchester United‘s defending as ‘Under 10s football’ after Demba Ba was left on his own to breakaway and score the opening goal in a shock 2-1 defeat for Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s men.
Just 15 minutes into the game, Istanbul Basaksehir managed to turn defence into attack following a short corner from United, which was eventually cleared up to the field to Ba who was all alone on the halfway line. Nemanja Matic was the player closest to him but he was unable to get back to stop the striker from breaking the deadlock.
Ex-United midfielder Scholes was incredulous as to how his former side could have left Ba on his own and described the defending as ’embarrassing’ and ‘all over the place’.
‘Surely you always have someone back on the halfway line, they’re pointing at Matic. You’re always goalside, it’s like Under 10s football,’ Scholes told BT Sport.
‘You can understand if it’s last minute but it’s the first 10 minutes, it’s embarrassing.
‘They’ve struggled with them attacking wise, they’ve gone with one holding player today. Defensively they’re all over the place.
‘The defenders have to be better, forward play could be better as well. Defensively they’ve got to take responsibility, you have to defend one-on-one sometimes when you’re at Manchester United they seem incapable of doing it.’
Joining in with the anger of his fellow team-mate Scholes, United legend Rio Ferdinand could hardly contain himself when offering analysis in the studio.
Interjecting across host Gary Lineker, Ferdinand said: ‘Hold on, please Gary.
‘Where is the organisation in this team? You wouldn’t see this on Hackney Marshes!’
Solskjaer tried to offer an explanation for defensive lapse, before claiming the defending was ‘unforgivable’.
After seeing his side slump to a shock defeat in Turkey, Solskjaer said: ‘The performance wasn’t good enough against a team that worked and ran and well they hit us on the break a couple of times and score a coupe of goals like you sometimes doing Europe when you don’t defend well enough.
‘We play a short corner and forget about the man up top and that’s unforgivable and, of course, the second one as well we’re not very well organised to counter-press and win the ball back when we play in.
‘Two soft goals to give away and then we didn’t have enough to comeback in the second half. [We had] 45 minutes to save something from the game – we threw everything at it but couldn’t break them down.’
When asked what the defeat means, Solskjaer reluctantly admitted that it was a reality check as they became the first English team to lose in the Champions League this season, despite their promising start.
Solskjaer added: ‘[The defeat has] set us back a lot, you get a reality check every time you play football here. Nothing becomes history quicker than a game of football.
‘You don’t just turn up and get three points in the Champions League that’s shown here today. We played against lots of good individuals in a good teams set up and we weren’t good enough that’s it.
‘It’s not easy to be positive now of course it isn’t when you’ve just lost the way you did but these players are good players and we have a chance on Saturday morning to get going again.’
Solskjaer’s former team-mate and United legend Rio Ferdinand was also left ‘flabbergasted’ by the visitors’ defending during the first half.
‘That’s a goal you usually see when you’re trying to get an equaliser on the 89th minute,’ said Ferdinand.