Welbeck Earns Manager's Praise

David Moyes is backing Danny Welbeck to achieve a consistent level of form that will yield goals for the striker on a regular basis.

Welbeck scored twice in a man-of-the-match display in Sunday’s 3-0 win at Aston Villa, his second double of the season after his salvo on the campaign's opening day at Swansea.

The Manchester-born England forward has five goals in total this term and Moyes is confident there’s more to come from the 23-year-old as his Old Trafford career develops.

"He’s a good player and his goals will help him," the manager said. "He’s important to me and hopefully he can get a level of performance which keeps getting him goals.

"He’s always been labelled with that: does he score enough goals? But he has got us a few this season, though he had a period of injury, which was disappointing.

"We like Danny a lot. He works well every day, he came up through the Academy and he’s one of United’s own. He’s really important to this club."

At the other end of the field, the Reds’ defence kept a second consecutive clean sheet in the weekend win at Villa Park.

Moyes has regularly been forced to make changes to his back four but has no qualms because of the defensive strength in his squad.

"I don’t think we’ve had defensive problems – I think we have lots of really good defenders," he said.

"We have had one or two people out, but that’s why we have got the numbers we have. If we get injuries, we can put others in and I was really pleased we kept two clean sheets.

"It’s part of football: you have to make sure you’re good at defending. We’ve got some good defenders and we want them to play well as a unit. it gives us a chance to win if we don’t concede goals."