Moyes: Small Mistakes Cost Us

David Moyes bemoaned "small mistakes" by Manchester United as the Reds slipped to a sixth defeat of the season on New Year's Day, against Tottenham Hotspur at Old Trafford.

Despite dominating possession and having more shots on goal than the visitors, United came away from the fixture empty-handed.

"We got done on the counter-attack for a couple of goals and made a couple of mistakes," Moyes said after the match, "but I thought the team played very well today.

"All you can do is play well and then hopefully you take your opportunities when they come and you don’t make small mistakes."

Moyes is adamant United "never deserved to be behind" and yet the players found themselves 2-0 down after 66 minutes thanks to Tottenham goals from Emmanuel Adebayor and Christian Eriksen.

Danny Welbeck halved the arrears inside a minute of Eriksen’s goal before the Tottenham side stood firm to repel wave after wave of United attacks.

“The players played very well,” the manager said. “Their effort was terrific to try and get back into the game after being 2-0 down.

“I actually thought when we got the goal back that we’d go on and win the game, never mind draw it; with the amount of chances we had, we really should have done so.

"We shouldn’t have been in the position of being 2-0 down. We’d already made a change to see if we could go for it a little more and get a goal back but their second goal was on the counter-attack.

"We didn’t have a lot of players in the middle of the pitch when they broke on us and we went 2-0 down."

The result leaves United 11 points adrift of league leaders Arsenal, in seventh position on the Barclays Premier League table.

Although Moyes admits he’d like to see the Reds closer to the top of the tree, he’s not panicking following a performance he believes contained plenty of positives.

“We’ll keep trying to win the next game now,” he said. “That’s all you can do. We’re not necessarily looking at the league table – we’d like to be higher but we’ll go and try and win the next game.”