Man U vs. Newcastle
Venue: Old Trafford
Kick off: 5:30PM
Manchester United will be looking to recover from their worst ever Premier League start when they welcome Newcastle United to Old Trafford this evening.
Jose Mourinho’s side have picked up just 10 points from their opening seven games of the season, but take on a Newcastle team still searching for their first win of the campaign.
Another week, another string of sagas at Manchester United, who are dominating almost every headline in football for all the wrong reasons at the moment.
If the latest reports are to be believed, Mourinho read the riot act to his players prior to Tuesday night‘s Champions League match against Valencia, and what he got in response was yet another dour display at Old Trafford.
The goalless draw saw them surrender top spot in Group H and extend their winless run to four matches across all competitions, having also drawn with Wolverhampton Wanderers and lost to Derby County and West Ham United in that time.
United have not gone five games without a victory since December 2015, and they know that they must find a return to winning ways sooner rather than later with successive matches against Chelsea, Juventus and Everton immediately after the international break.
There is no shortage of things for Mourinho to sort out at the moment, but chief among them must be his side’s home form. United have not won in front of their own fans since the very opening day of the season almost two months ago, going four home games without a win since then.
The current United team looks like a group bereft of confidence, though, and that will surely not be helped by further thinly-veiled criticism being levelled at them by Mourinho in the wake of the uninspiring Valencia stalemate.
On the other hand, Newcastle have not beaten one of the ‘big six’ away from home in the Premier League since December 2015 and have recorded only two wins in their 42 Premier League away games in Manchester, losing 28 of those.
Failure to improve on that statistic means that Newcastle would go eight top-flight games without winning at the start of a season for only the third time in their history.
Man U possible XI: De Gea; Valencia, Lindelof, Smalling, Shaw; Fred, Matic, Pogba; Sanchez, Lukaku, Rashford
Newcastle possible XI: Dubravka; Yedlin, Lascelles, Clark, Dummett; Ritchie, Diame, Shelvey, Kenedy; Perez; Joselu