”Manchester United have been poor defensively.” This is a common quote that has been said amongst Football fans, pundits and all involved in Football across the globe as sadly it has been true.

Five clean sheets in the first four months of this season and eight in total so far speaks volumes as for a club of our stature and considering what we are competing for that is a horrendous statistic.

If it was not for our superb attacking play and ruthless strikers such as Robin van Persie, Wayne Rooney and Javier Hernandez you would have to question just how this team would compete for the title as we have been leaking goals left, right and centre.

The amount of goals we have conceded at Old Trafford as well has been worrying as on two occasions we have conceded three goals at home to Tottenham which we went on to lose 3-2 and Newcastle United who we had to outscore to win 4-3.

Despite our frailties at the back it seems that of late we have been improving defensively and I can’t help but think the return of one Nemanja Vidic has played a role in this.

He played the full 90 minutes against West Brom which we went on to win 2-0, keeping our first clean sheet in a month since we played West Ham at home in late November when Robin van Persie scored the winner after 30 seconds.

Vidic didn’t play in the game a few days later on New Year’s Day at Wigan but we managed to keep another clean sheet there and these were our first successive clean sheets in the Premier League all season as we ran out 4-0 winners.

We have kept two clean sheets since then with another of them being against West Ham at home in the FA cup replay and on Saturday evening against Fulham at Craven cottage.

I do believe things are on the up for us defensively and Vidic’s return has played a part in this as even though we have been conceding goals and haven’t been keeping clean sheets regularly we have been conceding just the 1 goal in most of our fixtures since the turn of the year.

We have been clearing our lines at times perfectly especially against Liverpool where we had to hold on and see the game out to win 2-1 with Vidic scoring a goal he had no idea about. Some of the defensive headers from Vidic, Rio Ferdinand and even RVP that day were fantastic as well.

Thanks for reading.

By Darren Hassennally @DarrenHazza