The never ending quest to find who is to blame for the awful season Manchester United are going through continues, and one of the things David Moyes has been consistent with is blaming everyone but himself for the bad results and disappointments.

It feels like a broken record, changing the track depending on the loss and circumstances: Referees, luck, quality of the squad, and simply his players. Himself? His decision to change the entire backroom staff? His management skills? It can’t be that, can it?

2014 Began with a home defeat to Tottenham. This time, Moyes decided to blame the referee.

It’s an incredible decision, in fact probably one of the worst I think I saw. The goalkeeper comes out, Ashley Young gets the ball before him and he follows through. If you follow through on a player anywhere else on the pitch with your foot high, it would be a red card. I find it incredible, but the people who employ the referees are going to have to look at that and see if they get that right.

There was the home loss to Swansea in the FA Cup, which brought a lot of pressure on Moyes. He went back to not having a good enough team to begin with.

There is an urgency that we would like to bring people in, but are those players available in January? There is no point in me hyping it up because the players we would like to bring in are probably not available in January, not because we don’t want to do it. I said I would try, but that it would probably be doubtful in January because of the window. I think I have been saying that fairly consistently. Don’t just read the headlines. If you read the small print, you will see that is what I said. It has lots of international players and everyone is getting an opportunity to show what they can do. Hopefully I will make the decisions from that. We have another big game in 48 hours’ time so we have to keep that in mind, but that is no excuse. We had a very strong team out.

After losing to Chelsea 3-1 at Stamford Bridge, it was pretty much Moyes trying to make it seem like a few defensive errors were all that stood in the way of a good result.

We did not deserve to be 2-0 down at half time. We had a little bit of bad luck with the first one but we can’t blame anyone else but ourselves for the other two. We did not defend well enough and did not get a chance like Chelsea got to score, so we can only blame ourselves for that. We didn’t score in their box and we didn’t defend well in our box. I thought we did well in between the two boxes, but then did not do what was required in the crucial areas.

Most recently, a new factor into Manchester United’s failures and disappointments has been brought in: Penalties. However, unlike previous times this season, Moyes actually admitted his team simply didn’t play well enough.

We didn’t play well enough to merit going through, but we were getting through, we had defended well enough to see the game out. It changed and credit to the lads for getting the goal to get us back in the game, but we didn’t play well enough and Sunderland came and deservedly got themselves in the final. The bigger disappointment was how we played. Of course, you would expect a better standard because, don’t forget, there are a lot of internationals out there. We wanted to score a second goal and had quite a few opportunities to score it. In the end, I just don’t think we got the level of performance we needed to go through the game. If we had got through, I would have been disappointed with the performance, but I’m doubly disappointed that we haven’t got to the final. But it went to penalties and our penalties were terrible.

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