‘Weed out rubbish’ – Man Utd must go through ‘pain barrier’ like Liverpool to win title again, says Owen in amazing rant

MICHAEL OWEN gave an impassioned rant on the state of Manchester United after they lost the derby on Saturday.

The former United ace, 41, bemoaned the lack of vision in place at the club and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s tendency to change things after every negative result or performance.

Getty – ContributorMichael Owen fumed at the lack of long-term vision in place at Manchester United[/caption]

EPAOle Gunnar Solskjaer was accused of chopping and changing tactics too often[/caption]

Owen was perplexed at United not having a long-term plan in place, suggesting it is costing the clubs millions without reward.

Appearing on DAZN, Owen said: “Manchester City have been doing that for years but what is a surprise is you turn up and you see Manchester United and you don’t know what formation they’re going to play.

“They’ve collected all these great players from around the world and they don’t even know what formation they’re going to play. They’re chopping and changing all the time.

“You’ve got to have a vision. You’ve got to be able to see further than the end of your nose and think ‘right this is the way we’re going to play’.

“If things go wrong, if you concede five against Liverpool you don’t think ‘ah right the defence is rubbish let’s go and put one more player in there’.

“It’s ridiculous. I go back to what Jurgen Klopp did at Liverpool.

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“He came in and said this is how we are going to play; ‘our full-backs are going to bomb forward, we’re going to have a sitting midfielder and play three up-front’.

“And you know what, we’ll go three-nil up and then they used to concede three all the time.

“Did he think ‘oh we concede all the time let’s put more defenders’ – no he didn’t!

“It’s the best thing in the world because it weeds out the weak, the poor players get weeded out because they get exposed in a formation.

“All Ole Gunnar Solskjaer does is as soon as there’s a weak player he covers for them and puts even more defenders on and in the mean time you’re buying hundreds of millions of pounds worth of players. You don’t do that.

“It’s rubbish, that’s not how you go about things. You have to have a long-term plan.

“Weed out the rubbish if that’s the case but you’ve got to go through a bit of pain along the way.

“If their target is to win the league then that’s how they’ve got to do it.”

Solskjaer has operated with a 3-5-2 since the 5-0 thrashing by Liverpool a fortnight ago, with mixed results.

It worked well in the 3-0 win over Tottenham a week later but United were dominated by City.

And they would have lost to Atalanta in mid-week with Cristiano Ronaldo saving them with an audacious last-minute volley.

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