Manchester United ‘can handle pressure’ in bid to end torturous Premier League wait

Former players backing Michael Carrick to build on promising start as manager, but fans’ impatience illustrated by reaction to AC Milan loss

When Manchester United told their 66 million Instagram followers on Saturday they had lost 4-2 to AC Milan, the responses were pretty unequivocal.

The kinder supporters wrote about a “reality check”, or implored the club’s deeply unpopular owners to put their hands in their pockets. In one case, the Glazers and their co-owner, Jim Ratcliffe, were told to “sell the whole team”. Others used terms like “disgrace”, “disaster”, “embarrassing” and “terrible”.

“We are cooked, [head coach, Michael] Carrick will be sacked by January,” chipped in one disaffected commenter.

Welcome to the modern Manchester United, where managers and players are subjected to a level of scrutiny scarcely matched elsewhere.

“To play for United, you have to let go of the pressure,” Antonio Valencia, who swapped the relative backwater of Wigan Athletic for Old Trafford in 2009, told the South China Morning Post. “You just need the manager’s confidence and to relax.”

In a decade with the club, Valencia won five major honours. He was part of the team that 13 years ago won the most recent of Manchester United’s 20 top-flight English titles.