United have been held to several draws this season after conceding late goals - Rostov and now Anderlecht in the europa League plus Arsenal, Everton and Stoke in the Premier League.
The Manchester United boss was left fuming at his side’s failure to add to Henrikh Mkhitaryan’s 37th minute strike before the Belgian’s forced an 86th minute equaliser through Leander Dendoncker’s bullet header.
Michael Carrick agreed with his manager after United were held to their 14th draw of the season here last night.He said: “It’s frustrating. We were so in control but got sloppy, we have to kill teams off. We should have won that game. “They had one chance and scored a header. We need to be more ruthless, it’s as simple as that. We were too comfortable. We got sloppy.
Mourinho insisted his side still remain favourites going into next week’s second leg at Old Trafford.
But he made it clear he blamed his misfiring forwards for the disappointing first leg draw.
He said: “i think sloppy is the right word maybe. I can’t find a better one.
“We have to play more seriously. We put altogether the performance of our three or four of our attacking players and you squeeze not much juice out of it.
“Marcus Rashford, Jesse Lingard, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Antony Martial. They were very similar.
“And the people behind, very solid, very focused. And if I was one of my defenders I would be very disappointed. They did the serious work and the people who should kill the game didn’t.
He added: “When you don’t get the second goal, you run a risk.We had lots of space to play, lots of space to kill, lots of chances, lots of half chances that didn’t become chances because of a bad decision, bad control, a sloppy flick. Very bad decisions in the bad third.
We were good defensively, very organised, very compact, but then they had one chance and we were punished.“It’s a valuable goal and a valuable result but we had the conditions to kill there game tonight.”