Ole Gunnar Solskjaer felt Manchester United were superior in the goalless first-half of their 3-0 League Cup quarter-final win over Colchester.
League Two Colchester went in at half-time with the scoreline 0-0 but United emerged to score three goals in 10 minutes after the restart to kill the tie and set up a two-legged Manchester derby semi-final.
Despite a goal glut and performance similar to the 4-0 rout of AZ Alkmaar in the Europa League last week, Solskjaer was more satisfied with United's display before the interval. Marcus Rashford spurned two clear opportunities from perceptive passes by Andreas Pereira but United hardly managed clear-cut chances and their opening goal after the pause came via a counter-attack.
"I thought we took our foot off the pedal, we didn't press them, we let them have the ball," Solskjaer said of the second-half. "We started making decisions that we don't normally do, wanted to beat men when there was no space, tried to shoot from not the right distances.
"It's about learning and decision-making all the time, and, of course, missing chances can happen, like we did in the first-half. But we prodded, we were patient, we probed and we created chances.
"Today the challenge was scoring goals, because we broke them down, created enough chances, it was just about quality of the finish. If we can add that to the team and dominate and create chances and be more clinical and ruthless, that's another step forward for us.
"Because there have been many games we've dominated and not won but deserved to win, but you don't really deserve to win if you don't score. We've got to develop that quality in the box.
"There's hunger there, we do extras with the strikers all the time. I was trying to hold Marcus back yesterday, because he wanted to do extra, it was two days after a game, and a day before a game but he was still on the training ground practising, and we'll get better and better."
