Manchester United need to adopt the arrogance and strut of Eric Cantona if they are to return to their former glories, claims Harry Maguire.
United fans still sing passionately about 'King' Eric Cantona, the man who helped them to their first league title in 26 years when they finished on top of the pack in 1993.
Cantona was honoured by UEFA last week and quoted Shakespeare as his accepted the Presidents' Award.
And the United fans were singing his name once again in the away end at St Mary's as Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's side stumbled to a 1-1 draw against 10-man Southampton .
Despite the result, there was plenty of talent on show from United's new look side, not least from youngsters Daniel James and Aaron Wan-Bissaka.
But new £80million defender Maguire claims that United are missing the sort of swag that Cantona brought to Old Trafford.
He said: “It’s another game where we’ve deserved to win. We’ve created the majority of the chances and we’ve dropped two points.
“The start of our season has been like that. We deserved to win at Wolves and then we conceded two shots against Palace and they scored two.
“We can definitely improve, especially on the ball. We gave the ball away far too much. We were too sloppy and we need to improve on that and show arrogance and be confident on the ball.
“We’re Man United – we want to control games. There were spells where we didn’t control the game, and we got punished.”
United's performance certainly improved following Kevin Danso's reckless second half red card.
But they were unable to find a breakthrough and have already fallen seven points behind the Premier League's pacesetters after just four games.
Maguire said: “That’s how we should play all the way through the game. You’ve seen the confidence of the players when they went down to 10 men.
“They seemed like they wanted the ball, everyone wanted to create a chance. We did enough in that 15 minutes to score a goal.
“We’ve got to be more clinical. We had numerous crosses, numerous balls across the box, we just needed to stick one in. We’ll keep working hard, keep improving.”
