He said: “I don’t think the defeat at Bolton means we are a soft touch.
“When you play for a team like United, you know that other teams are going to try to stop us playing our normal game.
“Some try to get as many men behind the ball as possible and others get a bit physical.
“The key is being able to overcome that – and I think we have got the players capable of it.
“Teams have been physical with us before this season and we have still beaten them, so it would be a big mistake for people to think that we can’t handle it just because we have lost one game.
“Whenwe lose it’s a massive shock and people outside the club look for reasons behind any United defeat. We just look at ourselves individually and as a team and look to react in the right way.
“I’m not worried that people will try to do to us what they did to Arsenal because we can handle that. It’s only ever brought up when we lose a game. We shouldn’t get caught up in the mistake of thinking that Bolton beat us because they kicked us.
“The bottom line is that we lost because we just didn’t play well.
“It wasn’t down to Bolton being physical and tackles flying in – we are used to that.
“We won’t use that as an excuse – we know that if we had passed the ball as we usually do then we would have probably got a result, but we didn’t create chances.
“What Bolton did wasn’t anything new. I have seen it down the years where teams try to kick us – they get men behind the ball and try to frustrate us.
“Even our newer players aren’t shocked when teams try to play it rough.
“Lads like Carlos Tevez and Anderson are no lightweights. They are physically tough and mentally strong, and they can handle themselves.
“You only have to see how intense the training is here. Players are desperate to be picked and every day the tackles are flying in on the training ground.
“Nine times out of 10 we overcome it with our football. We didn’t do that at Bolton, but it was just an off-day.
“We are going to lose games this season, we know that, but we also know that all the teams chasing the title will lose games as well.
“The defeat against Manchester City at the start of the season was a big blow, but we then put together a really strong set of results and now we have got to react in the same way.”
