Ferguson praises Rooney return

Sir Alex Ferguson was satisfied with the reaction Wayne Rooney received from the Old Trafford crowd as he came off the bench in Manchester United’s win over Wigan.

Patrice Evra and substitute Javier Hernandez scored the goals as United eased past Wigan, who had Antolin Alcaraz and Hugo Rodallega sent off and played with nine men for the last half-hour.

“It has been a good day for us, no question of that,” Ferguson said.

“If you had said at the start of the day would you take being joint top of the league I would have said ‘yes’.”

“We know that come the second half of the season we will definitely get better and now we are joint top with Chelsea.”

Rooney was making his first appearance for the Red Devils since his contract dispute with the club in which he threatened to quit before signing a five-year deal.

“Wayne got a great reception, that’s satisfying,” he said.

“It took a lot of pressure off the boy knowing that he could get a reception like he did.”

“I will play him against Rangers on Wednesday, that’s the sort of game he’ll get the full 90 minutes for and gradually get back to his best form.”

It wasn’t a classic performance from United but Ferguson was happy enough to see the team pick up three points.

He said: “It was a great break for us and we didn’t play well enough to be in front.”

“In the end we were having to do breakaways and they were trying to cling onto things at the end.”

“The funny thing about our performances at the moment is we are playing our best football in the last 20 minutes of the game.”

“I know they had only nine men left on the pitch but we made about six or seven chances in the last 20 minutes and should have scored more.”

“I think we’re still very difficult to beat and still dominate games.”

“Most of the games we play in we dominate. We just need more consistent team selection – we’ve had some with viruses and we had Wayne Rooney injured for spells and Ryan Giggs injured for spells. We need to maybe get more consistency.”