Soccer: United in crisis once more

David Moyes says he has never endured such a bad run of luck in his managerial career. Photo / AP

Former Old Trafford star Hughes says Moyes must use pressure to his advantage.

Mark Hughes once joked that the true measure of any crisis at Manchester United was when Monday morning brought the start of "cracked-badge week".

It was the moment when Hughes and his Old Trafford teammates would turn to the back page of whichever tabloid was lying around in the dressing room and see United's badge split in half for dramatic effect to drive home the sense of turmoil.

Hughes endured more than his share of cracked-badge weeks at United before the tide turned under Alex Ferguson in 1990, but David Moyes and his current group of players are seemingly suffering the same fate on a fortnightly basis.

So far in 2014, United have played eight games and lost five of them. Their recent Premier League sequence - LWLWLW - emphasises the lurches from calm to chaos, with Hughes' Stoke City deservedly ending a 30-year wait for a league win against United at the Britannia Stadium.

Moyes complains of bad luck, the worst of his career, but such gripes carry little weight at the elite level of sport. As United slumped to defeat at a windswept Britannia it was the absence of quality and belief in Moyes' team that was striking.

Clearly, it would be ignoring reality to suggest that Moyes has not contributed to the malaise, but it is also too simplistic to pin all of the blame on the former Everton manager.

Too many of his players are failing to deliver and failing to show why they are United players and Hughes, a central figure in the club's rise under Ferguson, suggests they should harness the pressure that comes with the red shirt in a positive sense.

"Obviously, there is huge focus on them," Hughes said. "But you have to deal with that attention. I used to use that as a motivation.

"From my point of view it was fear of failure. It was like, don't let anyone have the opportunity to criticise. That was what drove me on and I would suggest it's what drove a lot of United players on. United have always had that and they have players in their group now who have it.

"There will be pressure, that's obvious, but it goes with the territory. Don't forget, this team were champions last year and there hasn't been too many changes in personnel, only the guy at the top.

"At some point, Sir Alex was going to leave, we all knew that, but when the appointment [Moyes] was made, everyone thought it was absolutely the right one and I've not seen anything that changes my mind on that. David is not green behind the gills."

Moyes is probably becoming fed up with managerial rivals offering him support by extolling the virtues of patience after another United defeat. Yes, he will be offered time to put United back on track, but the nature of the team's decline is eating into his margin for error and patience may be less forthcoming from the terraces and the boardroom if progress is not evident early next season.

Moyes' tactics also deserve scrutiny, with United seemingly without a Plan B beyond attacking the byline and crossing for misfiring forwards.

"I've never had as bad a run [of luck] as this one," Moyes said. "I'm a football guy, I know how it works and you take it as it comes, but this has been quite a long, sustained period. I don't rely on luck, I believe you earn your luck by how hard you work on the things you do."