Manchester United head coach Marc Skinner says that the fans are very much with the team and he insists that they know that wins are not too far away.
The Red Devils go into Sunday’s Barclays FA Women’s Super League fixture at Brighton & Hove Albion without a win in four league matches.
Three of their last four league outings have ended in draws while league leaders Arsenal are the only team to have beaten Manchester United in that time.
When speaking to FAWSL Full-Time in his pre-match press conference, Manchester United boss Skinner said that his side are not far away from winning games and he believes that the fans very much have the same opinion.
“Whenever we interact with the fans, they know that we are so close to taking results and taking performance,” Skinner said.
“I have quite a young team that sometimes doesn’t yet have the experiences that we are building together now to manage some moments, that’s what happens. If you are winning, sometimes it masks some of the things that are not so good so I’d rather go through this experience together in the early phase, iron it all out together, look at each other in the face and be honest with each other – when it’s not great we continue to promote that, where it’s not as great in terms of results and we want to take wins when we are taking draws then why are we taking draws? Watch the games, we should be winning those games, we know that and so that is probably where more frustration comes in.
“For the fans, you know how close we are, you know how much we love you, we know how much you mean to our team and we are going to continue fighting and fighting. We will get to a point where we will look back on this as the biggest learning phase and biggest growing phase for us.
“Sometimes you have got to win ugly and for us, we have to learn from our results and determine whether we can be better in that moment, whether we can control the game better and whether we can avoid putting ourselves in positions where we concede goals that are manageable for us. That is something that we will definitely come through the other side of and be a better team for it, better individuals for it and it will only support our future successes. What we feel now, what we experience now will only fire us up for future success, I have no doubt about that.
“We all feel the frustration, we all want to win, we know that the fans want to win because they are so passionate, we want to win with them and for them. Since I came in, they have been with us with our inception of how we are going to win, the frustrations we will hope to work together to melt away in the future so that we have the success that we all crave.”
Manchester United have won just two of their last nine games in all competitions within 90 minutes but Skinner went on to say that he is not concerned by the recent run of results.
He said “You want to win every game but you can flip that and say that it is only three losses, one was on penalties so it is only two losses in 90 minutes. You can look at it either way, if you take those points when you should win those games then it is a completely different situation.
“We are aiming to win these games and we should be winning them, not because we have any defined right to but we are actually earning the right to.
“You can look at it through either lens but the way that I’d definitely look at it is that we’ve lost against Arsenal and Chelsea and those are teams that we want to beat but we all know how good they are at the moment. We need to take points when we are on top and we need to make sure that we are scoring the goals that we need and don’t concede in silly moments. If we do that, we are talking about a completely different game, we are looking at how we now impact the top of the table, how we go and fight against those opponents.
“It is not concerning in terms of that I felt that in those games, we should be winning some of those that we have drawn. It is not something that I am concerned about, we have to keep concentrating on it and keep working hard.”
Manchester United’s latest Barclays FA Women’s Super League fixture at Brighton & Hove Albion kicks-off at 12.30pm on Sunday.
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