Manchester United legend Paul Scholes says Jadon Sancho’s performance in the early minutes of the 3-0 defeat to Sevilla on Thursday night typified the team’s attitude as a whole.

The £73m signing miscontrolled the ball and gave away possession a number of times, and Scholes feels the winger was simply unprepared mentally for the hostile atmosphere that United faced at the Ramon Sanchez Pizjuan:

“We saw how hostile the crowd were before the game. Sevilla were so aggressive and you’ve got to give them credit. During the warm-ups we were eulogising about the crowd and saying how aggressive and hostile it was. When the United players see and hear that they need to go into the dressing room and think, ‘I need to be ready for this and my first touch has got to be ready’.”

“You see Jadon Sancho in the first five minutes tonight, the ball bounced off him three times, terrible weight of pass too. I’m a big fan of the lad but you’ve got to liven up and be ready.”

Big European games require big characters but United’s players acted more like shrinking violets, and they failed to cope with the pressure.

It has become a pattern in big away matches this season. The losses to both Manchester City and Liverpool have been the nadir, but there was also that embarrassing defeat against Brentford at the start of the campaign that can’t be forgotten either.

Of course, if the likes of Bruno Fernandes, Marcus Rashford, Lisandro Martinez and Raphael Varane were available, it would have helped matters, but manager Erik ten Hag knows a lot of work needs to be done on the squad’s mentality. Whether Sancho’s attitude can be changed as well, we shall have to wait and see.