Sir Alex Ferguson hit out at the petulance of Liverpool midfielder Jonjo Shelvey, while also expressing his satisfaction at finally being able to pick up a positive result at Liverpool after their 2-1 win in the English Premier League on Sunday.

Liverpool went down to ten men a little after 30 minutes at Anfield, with referee Mark Halsey showing a straight red card to Jonjo Shelvey for a reckless lunge on Jonny Evans. Ferguson had no doubts about the red card, with the situation further compounded when the Liverpool youngster, on his way to the tunnel, pointed a finger at Ferguson accusing him of inciting the referee to give him the red card.

"I think it's a clear sending off, I've absolutely no doubts about it," Ferguson said. "I've seen the replay. It was reckless.

"Jonny Evans, who has dived in, went for the ball and got the ball, no question about that, but Shelvey was nowhere near getting the ball and could have given Jonny Evans a real bad injury. He was very lucky, actually.

"He (Shelvey) came and blamed me. Why not? Why look at himself in the mirror? Just blame someone else. I think the boy's young and when he looks at it again he'll realise the stupidity of it. He may apologise, he may not,"

Shelvey later tweeted he had apologised to the Ferguson.

Robin Van Persie scored from the spot late on to give United all three points, after Rafael cancelled out Steven Gerrard's opener, in a game which was dominated by Liverpool, despite playing with only 10-men for nearly an hour.

"I thought we were poor, to be honest with you," Ferguson told the club's official website. "I think the last four years we've allowed the crowd to get to us a little bit -- they give fantastic support to their team and they really dominated the first half.

"Second half they got a great start. With ten men I thought that was a great boost to them because it was something to hold on to, but credit to the players in that respect; the second half we played much, much better, but we were against ten men. I think Scholes, Carrick and Giggs' experience got us through.

"In the last four years here we haven't played well. Today at least we've got a result. Hopefully that's a turning point for us because if you look back over the years we always did really well here.

"I think it was about five, six, seven years in a row we did exceptionally well, but it goes in cycles anyway. Before we had that run they had a period in the late '80s of getting results against us, so it's maybe our turn to start."

Ferguson also revealed the reason behind leaving out Nemanja Vidic for the crunch encounter at Anfield. "He was just feeling a bit tight round about his knee and we decided just to give him a break today," Ferguson added. "Hopefully he'll be alright next week."