So unfortunately Pep Guardiola continues his dominance over Jose Mouinho whether JM is managing Real Madrid, Inter Milan or Manchester United it would seem. Jose’s record stands at three win with eight losses and six drawn matches. Many thought that Jose was due for a win simple because of the law of  averages. Unmistakeably, Mark Clattenburg cost United dearly with a couple of refereeing blunders but as usual there is nothing United can do other than grin and bear it.

United looked out of sorts in the first half and although it pains me to say it, City were actually decent value for their lead. It took the legendary Ibrahimovic’s fine volleyed goal to drag United back into the game. As Mourinho said he, “did not want to make 3 changes after 20 mins” even though the United performance made him feel like that was the only course of action. Fortunately, Zlatan did drag United back into the game in the second half and after JM replaced the totally overawed Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Jesse Lingard with Marcus Rashford and Ander Herrera the side looked much better as Mkhitaryan in particular looked totally out of his depth in this fixture as did Lingard who looked to be a bit lost under the new expectations of him.

Jose made his final throw of the dice when he put on Anthony Martial to replace Luke Shaw on 81minutes but it was too little too late. The only man who looked capable of breaking down City along with Ibra was the starlet Marcus Rashford. When speaking about the man/striker of the moment, Mourinho said Rashford looked just like he was “playing against Salford City under-18s” in a 2nd half showing containing lightening pace and a fearless, direct approach which should have produced an equaliser had his goal-ward strike not had the misfortune to clip an offside Ibrahimovic making it a no-goal.

So all is not lost after one League loss, in fact we now know that Rashford has to be used in the team more often than not and the youngster is fast making himself a star in his own right who can learn so much from Zlats. It might have been a Derby loss but so much was learned by Jose Mourinho – i.e. that he has two genuinely world class strikers on his hands in the form of Ibrahimovic and Rashford and he now just has to figure out how to get them both in the team to get the best out of them.