WE were rubbish. That's how my dad summed up the Potters performance at the so-called Theatre of Dreams yesterday.

He was there, in the stands, surrounded by happy Mancs which must have been a pretty galling experience.

Now given that we lost to officially the best team in Europe, "rubbish" may seem like a harsh sentiment.

We tried to do what we did to Liverpool, frustrate them and deny them space.

That might have worked had Thomas Sorensen stopped that first Ronaldo free kick, which was well struck but heading into the middle of the goal.

The big man has played an important part in our success this season, but he flapped at the ball and it went past him.

Far from this opening the floodgates, Stoke held on until just before half time when United got the second.

Now when you hold a team to 0-0 at half time, as we did at Liverpool, keeping the same tactics makes sense.

What does not make sense to me is our decision to stick with the same strategy at 2-0 down. Surely we had to go for it, didn't we?

Our defence has done fantastically well in recent games, but were we really expecting to keep the scoreline the same by sitting back?

In the end this result may matter little if we play to our maximum in the next three home matches.

West Brom don't like playing us and we can go into that match believing that three points are there for the taking.

Hull have surprised many people this season, but if we can match Aston Villa and Arsenal at the Brit, the match against them is certainly a winnable one.

And we have a home match against those terrible travellers Fulham.

Even two wins out of those three matches will see us reach 20 points, a decent return if you consider 40 might keep us up.

So there is room for optimism, despite the United result.

But surely it is time for us to rethink the strategy for our away matches? Two 0-0 draws are all we have to show so far. And in both of those we have hardly had a shot on target in the 90 minutes.

Our plan seems to be to hope that the opposition get upset by our tactics and fail to perform on the day, but we offer next to nothing as an attacking force.

Is that because Tony Pulis genuinely believes we don't have the players to offer that threat?

Or is it, as I suspect, that he's great setting up teams in advance, but not good at reacting when his plans go wrong.

Forget United, we were probably never going to win that one.

But are we going to play this way in away matches at Hull, Sunderland, Fulham and West Brom? Surely that's just asking for trouble.