'First of all, thank goodness for United’s fantastic fans on Saturday at Ewood Park. Without their brilliant support of the team there was very little to get excited about.
The fans were our star people; the support they gave the team was absolutely tremendous. The crowd that follows the team home and away in particular have done it all season. They are a credit to Manchester United, but they have to be rewarded with better performances.
The game was so disappointing, and that has happened too often since January. The games we thought we should win, we haven’t. However, we have to be careful when we’re dissecting performances like Saturday’s, purely because we were without the likes of Keane, Scholes, van Nistelrooy, Saha and Ronaldo.
But we didn’t seem to have any shape or pattern against Blackburn. It highlights the point that we haven’t got the depth we want or need in the current squad. The new players still need time to settle in; players like Kleberson, Djemba-Djemba, Nicky Butt and Phil Neville haven’t played that much football recently, but we certainly lacked width and any real penetration.
From the team selections made in the last few weeks and the subsequent performances, though, I think Sir Alex Ferguson will have a better idea now of where the strengths and weaknesses of the squad lie.
The manager has said many a time in the last few weeks that he is weighing up his team selection for the FA Cup final, but I think there could be much more to it than that. The players in their first season do need that bit of breathing space – it’s unfair to judge them too critically at this stage; Kleberson, Bellion and Djemba-Djemba only have a fragmented first season under their belts. Sir Alex will have constantly been looking at how to refine his team in the summer and I am sure he already has a clear picture of the quality of the first XI’s back-up – and it certainly looked lacking on Saturday.'