Matheus Cunha rescued a 1-1 draw for Manchester United at Craven Cottage after Lisandro Mart\u00ednez\u2019s own goal had given Fulham the advantage. It was a result that spared United a defeat, but it did little to calm the criticism that followed a second-half collapse in intensity.<\/p>\n
The first half was lively enough without producing a goal, with United showing occasional fluency through quick passing and tidy combinations. After the interval, though, the level dropped sharply. That decline became the major talking point of the afternoon, especially after Gary Neville described the 15 minutes after halftime as the \u201cworst\u201d he\u2019d ever seen his club play since he started watching the Red Devils as a 5-year-old in 1980.<\/p>\n
Michael Carrick will take the point, but the performance against one of the Premier League\u2019s early strugglers raised more questions than answers. United looked most dangerous when speed entered their play, yet that rhythm was too infrequent to control the contest for long.<\/p>\n
Marcus Rashford\u2019s display summed up the frustration. Having lost some of the momentum that followed his reintegration, the England international wasted several promising openings and never found the conviction United needed. His lack of intensity in front of goal matched the wider drop-off in the team\u2019s attacking cohesion.<\/p>\n
There were brighter individual showings. Senne Lammens impressed in the first half despite limited success with Fulham\u2019s goal, while Bruno Fernandes came close to scoring when he struck the post. Kobbie Mainoo also maintained his standards before being withdrawn late on, and Cunha finished with a decisive contribution after earlier involvement in the goal sequence at the other end.<\/p>\n
In the end, United left with a draw that felt more like a warning than a recovery.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Cunha\u2019s late equaliser spared United defeat, but a poor second-half dip raised fresh concerns.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19969,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[713,1083],"tags":[1836,1162,180],"class_list":["post-19970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fulham","category-man-utd","tag-2026-27-premier-league","tag-analytics","tag-player-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19970"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19970\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}