Senne Lammens says Manchester United must keep pushing for third

Manchester United left Sunderland with a 0-0 draw and only one shot on target, but Senne Lammens says the mood inside the camp is not about winding down. The goalkeeper said Manchester United have Champions League football already, yet still want third place and do not want to slip below it.

Why Lammens thinks the season still matters

Lammens was clear about the message from Michael Carrick. "The manager has got the point across to us that this season is not finished," he said. "We have got Champions League, but we also want to finish third. We don't want to finish below third, we want to keep those other teams away from us."

That is the more important angle after a flat afternoon at the Stadium of Light. Manchester United are third with 65 points after 36 matches, and their recent league form is still solid enough to justify keeping the pressure on, with 10 points taken from their last five league games. A side that has already secured a European place can still have something real to play for when third is within reach.

Lammens also tied the message to standards rather than maths. "It's very important to show up and deliver in every game," he said. "We are going to try and win every game possible. We want to give back to our fans, who have been very supportive this season."

Carrick's defence and the criticism it drew

Michael Carrick was happy to frame the draw as a decent point. "We take the point. A clean sheet is always good to get," he said, adding that Manchester United had "created a lot of chances" and "nearly won it in the end." He also pointed to the fact that there were "some changes today" while praising the spirit and attitude of the players.

The problem is that the match itself was hard to dress up. United managed just one shot on target, and their first shot on target did not arrive until the 93rd minute. That is the sort of detail that makes Carrick's softer reading difficult to sell, even if the clean sheet was real.

Paul Merson was not buying the manager's tone. "He didn't sound right," he said. "When you're the manager of Manchester United you have to come out and say, 'we expect to come here and win.'" That pushback lands because the performance was so limited in attack, even if Carrick's point about the changes and the clean sheet was not out of thin air.

The broad view is probably somewhere between the two. It was a poor attacking display, but it was also a point, and a clean sheet, on a day when Manchester United did not create enough to claim much more. What matters next is whether Lammens's demand for a final push shows up again in the last two games.