Ralf Rangnick questions Manchester United players' fitness amid pressing demands

Ralf Rangnick has questioned whether Manchester United players are fit enough to meet his pressing demands.

Southampton coach Ralph Hasenhuttl said the Saints ‘came into the game’ after United struggled to maintain their pressing after the 40-minute mark in the teams’ 1-1 stalemate at Old Trafford.

United started the Rangnick era in a 4-2-2-2 formation that was abandoned after five Premier League games and Southampton have long operated in the same system under Hasenhuttl, Rangnick’s former colleague in the Red Bull group.

Hasenhuttl also remarked ‘it’s not a big secret that when [United] lose the ball, their reverse gear is not always the best from everybody’. Southampton were the more threatening side after Che Adams equalised in the 48th minute and United’s inability to press was partly former manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s undoing.

Rangnick acknowledged United are a technically-minded side but questioned their endurance and physicality, having said they were not ‘nasty’ enough against Southampton.

“To be honest, I don’t know if we are not fit enough to play that way because, as you said, I came in the middle of the season, we had no pre-season and, in essence, we had in total two weeks in total in between where we could train in a normal way,” Rangnick said.

“If I watched the team in training that is being prepared for games I wouldn’t allow myself to say we are not fit enough to play like that. I don’t think this is the case because then we would also struggle in the last 20 minutes of the game and then in the game against Burnley and today we showed that we are physically able to play forward.

“We didn’t always take the right decisions. We weren’t always composed and we weren’t structured enough in the way we