Manchester United vs Southampton: Premier League – as it happened

Good afternoon... or is it evening now? 

Welcome to The Independent's live blog for Manchester United vs Southampton! Stay tuned for all the team news coming soon...

Team News

Manchester United: De Gea; Young, Lindelof, Jones, Shaw; Pogba, Matic, Mata; Lingard, Mkhitaryan, Lukaku.

Southampton: McCarthy, Stephens, Yoshida, Hoedt, McQueen, Romeu, Højbjerg, Ward-Prowse, Tadić, Boufal, Long.

Henrikh Mkhitaryan, Jesse Lingard and Victor Lindelof the three changes made by Jose Mourinho after Boxing Day's 2-2 draw with Burnley.

Fraser Foster's run of 76 consecutive Premier League games is over. Alex McCarthy starts his first Premier League game since March 2016 when he played for Crystal Palace.

Team News

Here's those sides in full.

Missed the build up to this match in midweek? Well its all been dominated by Jose Mourinho's whinging about Pep Guardiola and Manchester City's spending.

“Without taking any credit from Manchester City and Pep and his staff and the players, obviously they have lots of credit in what they are doing but Pep arrived, he had the goalkeeper of England [Joe Hart], he doesn’t like him. He buys the goalkeeper of Barcelona [Claudio Bravo], he doesn’t like him. He buys another one [Ederson], now he likes him.

“He has [Pablo] Zabaleta and [Aleksandr] Kolarov, two very good players but more than 30 years old, he wants to replace. He doesn’t replace with two, he replaces with three. One from Tottenham [Kyle Walker], one from Monaco [Benjamin Mendy], one from Real Madrid [Danilo], as an example.”

Manchester United Manager Jose Mourinho

Previous Meeting

The two sides met in the Premier League in September when a certain Romelu Lukaku was in hot goal-scoring form. The Belgian scored the only goal of the game which kept Jose Mourinho' side on level points with Manchester City.

The teams are out and kick of is just minutes away. Stay tuned for live minute-by-minute updates from Old Trafford.

1: We're off. Southampton get things under way.

2: Dusan Tadic looks to release Shane Long but his pass is over hit. Long tries to use his pace but Ashley Young's speed is equal to his and the make-shift defender sees the ball away from danger.

3: Paul Pogba finds Juan Mata with an outstanding cross-field pass. Mata crosses to Romelu Lukaku who heads over from close range. That should be 1-0, Lukaku had time and space to find the back of the net.

6: Sofiane Boufal gets to the byline and cuts the ball back to James Ward-Prowse who meets the ball on the edge of the area. He side foots a shot towards the bottom corner but David De Gea was on hand to turn it away.