Boss Relieved By Nugent Miss

Sir Alex Ferguson cited David Nugent's glaring second-half miss as the turning point in United's victory over Burnley.

The on-loan Clarets striker shot wide just four minutes before Dimitar Berbatov opened the scoring, and the United manager felt the let-off galvanised home players and supporters sufficiently to prompt victory.

"If he'd scored then, Burnley would have had something to hold onto," he told MUTV. "I think we got a wee bit of a gee up then, and when the crowd gets up it makes a difference to our game. It wakens the players up. We had more speed about our game and I think we finished well.

"It was a funny game. We were frivilous with our chances and they had chances themselves. It could have been embarrassing. We were maybe just a bit nervous and anxious about our game, but the way the second half was going I just felt we were going to score.

"You need that goal to break open teams like that, particularly teams who are settling in at Old Trafford with men behind the ball. They played with three central midfield players, which causes problems at times. A 3-0 scoreline was maybe a bit unfair on them, but I don't think unjustly fair."

Berbatov broke the deadlock before being substituted along with Rooney, and Sir Alex confirmed that the Bulgarian had suffered a recurrence of his troublesome knee injury.

"Dimitar was feeling his knee again," he said. "He's played through it today. He could have come off at half time but he wanted to stay on, which is good. We'll look at it on Monday again.

"I think Dimitar was the one who looked like scoring today. Wayne had one of these days where he kept knocking it by the post, over the bar and he must have had 10 attempts, so he'll be relieved to get his goal. That calmed us down, that second goal."

The starting strikers were both removed after Rooney's killer goal, for Michael Owen and Mame Biram Diouf, and the latter celebrated his introduction by heading home a late third goal on his home debut.

"We've got a big programme coming up and I wanted to see how Michael Owen and Mame Diouf would do together, and they did ok," said Sir Alex.

"Mame's got great spring, the boy, he's quick and he'll look to run in behind them all the time. He's very good in the air and he's got a lot of good attributes we could use. we're quite excited about him."