Juan Mata Blog: A Long Way To Go

In his first blog entry of the new season, Juan Mata says United will learn from Saturday's opening-day disappointment...

I confess that I was looking forward to writing this first entry of the season. It’s been a couple of years since I started my blog, soon after my arrival in the UK.

I was so eager to get started because the preseason has been really exciting. The US tour has produced two very positive weeks, both in terms of results and performance.

But obviously, those good feelings were to be transferred to the first official game. That’s what we wanted, yet we didn’t do it. We couldn’t manage to show what we had been working on in previous days. Swansea had a very solid game and things got tough for us after their first goal.

It was a big disappointment, that’s the truth. We were hoping to make a good Premiership debut in Old Trafford, but it is also true that this is just the beginning. We need to set a regular pace and learn from our mistakes.

In order to get to our goals, the goals this club and our supporters deserve, we know we have to be better than we were on Saturday. Anything you want to achieve, you need to put a lot of effort in it and that is what we are going to do. Learning from a bad result will make the team grow and move forward in this new stage.