A furious Ruud van Nistelrooy said Leicester were not defeated “in Fergie time” but “in offside time” after Harry Maguire’s 93rd-minute winner for Manchester United was ruled legal and eliminated his side from the FA Cup. With no video assistant referee in the competition until the next round, Maguire’s winner was not chalked off despite the assistant referee being perfectly in line to see he had infringed.
“We are not defeated in Fergie time, we are defeated in offside time,” said Van Nistelrooy, referring to the extra minutes opponents claimed were allocated to United when needed under Sir Alex Ferguson, the Dutchman’s manager at Old Trafford. “It is a hard one to take because the game was decided on a mistake, that is clear. It is not a matter of VAR, where you have to look at millimetres. It is half a metre, it is clear. The team didn’t deserve to lose the game in this way. They fought, played well, and dominated the game for a long bit.”
Van Nistelrooy was asked if VAR should be used from the third round onwards when possible. “Let me think about that question,” he said.
Van Nistelrooy was curt when asked if being knocked out was a blow. “That is not a question for me,” he said. “We want to die on the pitch today, to get to the next round, to be the best we can be, to be competitive, we are representing ourselves on the pitch at Old Trafford.”
Ruben Amorim was visibly disappointed at United’s poor performance. “We had to believe until the end but this game has nothing to do with the time of Fergie,” he said.
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After Joshua Zirkzee’s 67th-minute equaliser cancelled out Bobby De Cordova-Reid’s first-half opener, Amorim conceded United were lucky regarding Maguire’s winner. “I think so,” the Portuguese said. “We need a lot of things, nothing to do with luck, it has to do with the quality of the work, we need to improve every detail of the game, energy.”
His verdict on the display was damning. “My work with them has to be so much better,” Amorim said. “But sometimes you need a little bit of luck and today we had. It’s really hard to lose one game in the last minute with an offside play. The performance: we have to do so much better with the ball, without the ball.
“We didn’t have any energy in the beginning, especially in the first half. Then in the second half we played a little bit better, with a little more speed, winning second balls. Then we managed to turn things around so it was a good result not a good performance.”
