Ruud van Nistelrooy blasted the officials for failing to spot four Manchester United players were offside for Harry Maguire’s winning goal against his Leicester City side, calling the error “unacceptable and unthinkable at this level”.. Bruno Fernandes floated in a free-kick from deep in the final minute of injury-time, with the game seemingly on the brink of extra-time, only for Maguire to head home in front of the Stretford End.. Replays showed the centre-back was one of four players stood in an offside position when Fernandes sent the free-kick into the box, but the linesman failed to raise his flag and with VAR not in use in the competition until the fifth round there was no recourse to reviewing the decision.. Van Nistelrooy was furious at the way his side lost a game they had led at half-time, when Bobby De Cordova-Reid had headed them in front. Joshua Zirkzee equalised before Maguire’s late and controversial intervention.. “We are gutted,” the former United striker said. “When you prepare the whole week for this game and reacting after the Everton loss, put in a performance like that and it is decided on a clear and obvious mistake, that is unacceptable and unthinkable at this level.. “There is nothing else to do but pick ourselves up. That is not what the team deserves.”. Van Nistelrooy said the decision shouldn’t have required intervention from VAR, claiming Maguire was clearly offside and that it should have been spotted by the officials in realtime.. “It is a hard one to take because the game was decided on a mistake, that is clear,” he said. “It is not a matter of VAR, where you have to look millimetres. It is half a metre, it is clear. The team didn’t deserve to lose the game in this way.”. United head coach Ruben Amorim admitted his team had got a bit of good fortune for the winner and said he would prefer to see VAR in use.. Asked if the goal was the stroke of luck United need, he said: “I think so. We need a lot of things nothing to do with luck, it has to do with quality of the work, we need to improve every detail of the game, energy, my work with them has to be so much better, but sometimes you need a little bit of luck and today we had.. “It’s not luck because with VAR it was not a goal and I think it’s important to have because it’s fair. It’s really hard to lose one game in the last minute with an offside play, but sometimes we deserve a little bit of luck.”
