Paul Pogba said he was not allowed to talk after Manchester United failed to arrest their recent slump with a drab 0-0 Champions League draw against Valencia. Jose Mourinho’s United have made their worst start to a league campaign in 29 years after an embarrassing 3-1 loss at West Ham and are already out of the League Cup.
Tuesday’s stalemate at Old Trafford was their fourth consecutive match without a win. Many players avoided the post-match mixed zone interview area after the game to avoid awkward questions. Pogba was among those to go through but told reporters “I’ve been told I’m not allowed (to talk).”
The French World Cup winner, who was last week told he would not captain the side again, appeared to get under Mourinho’s skin after their recent draw with Wolves by saying United should attack more.
Captain Antonio Valencia and midfielder Marouane Fellaini have both backed the manager despite the growing crisis at the club. Valencia insisted he is “fully supportive” of Mourinho after appearing to back calls for the under-fire manager to leave.
The 33-year-old ‘liked’ an Instagram post from a fan account which said that “recently Mourinho has made watching us a punishment” and “it’s time for Mourinho to go”.
But he attempted to explain and apologise yesterday. “Yesterday, I liked a post on Instagram without reading the text that accompanied the picture,” the right-back wrote on Twitter. “These are not my views and I apologise for this. I am fully supportive of the manager and my teammates. Everything will calm down when we get some wins,” the Ecuadoran added.”We are 100 per cent behind the manager.”
The players attempted to show a united front before kick-off by breaking with tradition and taking part in a pre-match huddle. “Everyone is going in the same direction to try to improve and to do better,” Fellaini said of the on-pitch huddle.
“I think we wanted to show that we are together. I think we showed improvement and we have to keep going,” he added.”Everybody (was behind the idea).I think everybody is behind the manager.”
We don’t have technical quality, says Mourinho
 Meanwhile, Mourinho risked causing another rift with his United stars as he slammed his defence’s lack of “technical quality”. United rarely looked like scoring against their out-of-form opponents and were booed off at full-time.
Now he has taken a swipe at his back four, which against Valencia featured Antonio Valencia, Chris Smalling, Eric Bailly and Luke Shaw. “We don’t have the technical quality to build from the back,” Mourinho said.
“The players tried. They raised the level of their intensity in spite of the fact we don’t have many with that intensity. We had probably a couple of the biggest chances to win it but I have accepted the result as a fair result.”
Mourinho admitted United had focused on stopping Valencia causing them problems, even though they were at home, because his team are so badly lacking confidence at present. “We tried to do something we did well which was to stop a fast team on the counter attack. We knew we wouldn’t create 20 chances,” he said.
“Our attacking players aren’t in their best moments of confidence and individual level. We thought with three or four chances we would score and win the game. It is a not a bad result. Not a good result, but not bad. We have two matches against Juventus to make points. It is a very difficult group, yes. We have Newcastle (this weekend) before the league stops, then we have Chelsea and Juventus in three days. It will be good for the team if we can beat Newcastle.”