Gary Neville explains why he's so concerned by what he heard from Christian Eriksen

Gary Neville thinks Christian Eriksen's comments speak volumes about the dire state of play at Manchester United.

The Red Devils succumbed to their third Premier League defeat of the season (and their second by a 3-0 margin) after being mauled by Tottenham in front of over 70,000 dejected fans inside Old Trafford. It marked their third game without a win following successive draws against Crystal Palace and Twente.

After the latter, Eriksen, 32, blasted his team-mates by claiming Twente "wanted it more", and Neville reckons rot might have figuratively set in within the walls of United's dressing room. Speaking on Sky Sports after Sunday's defeat to Spurs, the United legend, 49, branded his former side's performance "disgusting".

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"When I think back to Christian Eriksen's comments after the game on Wednesday night, from someone who's in the dressing room, from someone who's a very senior player who should be trusted, when he says that they didn't want it and they don't want it as much as another team in a game of football, that matters more than anything that anybody else can say," Neville said.

"He's inside there [the dressing room], he's seeing with his own eyes. We know what's happening in there can't be great because we see it transmits into what's happening on the pitch. That old adage of what you do in training and what you do every day in your life comes out here on a Saturday or a Sunday is very true.

"That's why when you hear people talk about in the Sir Alex Ferguson era, that training was at 100% intensity every single minute of every day, the preparation, the detail of every single thing, everything you eat, everything you do with your sleep, everything you do with drink and hydration. The detail of everything has got to be absolutely perfect, and then you might see something on a Saturday.

"There's no doubt that something's going wrong in that United dressing room because that today... what we saw in the first half today, honestly, it was the worst we've seen under Erik ten Hag."

The result leaves United 12th in the table and eight points behind Premier League leaders Liverpool after just six matches. It's understood that Ten Hag, 54, will be given the chance to turn things around, but the axe will almost certainly swing if results and performances don't pick up soon.

What's worse, United's players might feel that the writing is on the wall for the Dutchman, and Neville thinks that'll make it twice as hard for Ten Hag to whip them into shape.

"I don't believe, and I've said this before, that there's a football player in this country that wants to play badly, that wants to not work hard, that wants to not win," he said. "Because at the end of the game they're getting criticised, and then they have to play in very difficult circumstances. I don't believe it ever happens.

"But through the last 10 or 12 years we've seen a pattern at the end of managers' reigns where there's this complete and utter pressure drain on the players where they look like they don't care. And I don't believe that, I think these players care.

"But I'll go back to Eriksen's comments on Wednesday night, he's your team-mate, lads... and he, a senior player in the dressing room, has said you don't fancy it. Christian Eriksen. Not a kid who's a bit emotional. A player who has played hundreds and hundreds of games at the highest level has decided he's going to walk into an interview and question the work ethic of his team-mates.

"So [to the United squad], you can be upset about what we in the media are saying and what social media's saying - your own team-mate's saying it. You've got nowhere to go, and that's a real problem."

Speaking to TNT Sports after the game on Wednesday, Eriksen, who was fault for Twente's equaliser, said: "It’s disappointing. We wanted more in the end but it wasn’t good enough. They looked like they wanted it more than us and that can’t be right. That was said in the dressing room.

"Personally you score and think you’re going to be the matchwinner and then it goes the other way. We didn’t lose but it feels like a loss."

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