Manchester's police and crime commissioner Tony Lloyd has demanded answers from Manchester United after their match against Bournemouth was abandoned on Sunday.
Old Trafford was evacuated shortly before kickoff on what was meant to be the final day of the Premier League season after a suspect package was found inside the North-West Quadrant of the ground.
However, it later emerged that a security firm had accidentally left the fake bomb in the toilets after a training exercise earlier that week.
"I think United have to come up front with all this because in the end it's their reputation, but it's also public safety and both those two really do matter. I think United have got to begin to put answers forward and I look forward to hearing what they have to say as soon as possible," Lloyd, who is also the mayor of Greater Manchester, said in a statement.
"Fiasco is the right word. It was shambolic. Of course United are a huge organisation. It wasn't the fact they're the world's richest club - that they are - it was the fact that the security had missed something that in the end ought to have been found.
"What's almost impossible to understand is how in placing so many dummies for an exercise, those dummies were not counted in again. If that was, as I understand it, on Wednesday, really shouldn't people be searching all the way through till it's found, whether on Wednesday, on Thursday, on Friday - and certainly long before 20 minutes before kickoff of a major game at a time when already tens of thousands of people were in the ground?
"I think it's also astonishing that there isn't a routine sweeping of the ground to find something that seemingly was discovered quite easily once the sweep was taking place 20 minutes before kickoff, but far too late on."
The fixture has since been rescheduled for Tuesday, May 17 at 8pm.
Barney Corkhill
