Every word from Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s press conference 23 November 2020

Anthony Martial scored a lot of goals last season – he never went more than three games without scoring. He seems to be finding it a lot more difficult this season – what is the reason for that?
“You’re right, Anthony really did develop last season. I thought he took big strides towards becoming the striker that we know he can be. Then again, Anthony is no different from other players in the team in that he’s not had a pre-season as normal. He’s working to get to his peak form. Obviously, he lost three games, well, three-and-a-half games… almost four games with the suspension and that was very early in the Tottenham game. He’s lost too much football. He scored against Basaksehir last time [with] a good header. We hope that he’s just going to keep working hard to get to his best again.”

Before the last game against Istanbul Basaksehir, you mentioned that United are getting closer to the principles of play that you want them to do. Could you elaborate on those a bit? What’s your ultimate long-term vision for this United team and how you want them to play?
“How long have you got? Because that deserves more than just one sentence and I don’t think we have that time. Of course, we look at Man United throughout the history, we’re a team that wants to attack; we want to be good on the break, we want to have quick attacking players to cause problems when we’ve defended well. But, then again, more and more teams when they drop back and you want to be the team that can break teams down. I think we showed that against Everton the type of team we can be. We scored from crosses, from long attacks that we built up and we scored the winning goal on the counter-attack. So, we don’t want to be defined by just one style of play. We want to have positive players, expressing their talents and of course we want to dominate games. We’re working on it and the players are developing.”

How important is it that you win this game tomorrow given the make-up of the group? I know that you’re top at the moment, but it could change quite quickly given the strengths of the other teams in the group…
“It’s always a good question. The short answer is: very. We know the look of the group. We’re disappointed by losing the last game against Istanbul. We need at least 10 points to go through, definitely, but maybe it’s even likely that you have to have 12 points. We’re going to go into this game trying to win it and then try to win it well with a good performance because we’ve got games coming up thick and fast. Getting to 10 points as quickly as we can was always the main point, and defeat was a big blow last time.”