The Devil In Me

Finally the day has come where I am able to write the words ‘excellent delivery by Ryan Giggs’. In fact I can write it twice and I think I just might ‘excellent delivery by Ryan Giggs’.

It is very very difficult not to be positive about this performance, Rooney has scored again, we are reminded that we do actually have a player who can take penalties and of course there was also those Giggs deliveries.

Were it not for Christiano last season, my player of the year would quite easily have been John O’Shea, yet it pains me to say that he was clearly at fault for their first goal.

Here is what I think is quite an important question.
When, excluding international friendlies, did you last see a fully fit goal keeper substituted during a match?

It must have been really awesome to be an Aston Villa fan after ten minutes of this game.  They were pinging the ball about well and recorded the honour of being the first team to score against United in ten hours.  That footballing sage Mark Lawrenson had predicted an upset and it really looked like it was in the script at that point.

Step forward Mr. Rooney, whose ability to get the better of both his marker and the linesman has been astonishing over the last couple of weeks. Goals number 3 and 4 could well resurface in a Christmas television show about comedy bloopers but that should not detract from the fact that this was a good, good victory. Villa are no mugs and I always have certain amount of respect for the character of O’neill’s teams, where has he not done a good job of being manager?

There were shades of the match against Bolton last year in the team showing that they really are rather good. It should be noted that yesterday in playing at various points O’Shea, Scholes, Giggs, Brown, Pique and Fletcher we fielded six players who have come up through the ranks. I wonder how many other Premiership clubs could say that. I’ll bet it is a rather circular number.

Wigan are the perfect neighbours. They live inoffensively near by and have never complained when we have had a party, even if we are doing so at their expense. They were even polite enough to roll over in a cup final for us a couple of years ago. Splendid, splendid chaps.

The one nil to United result was becoming eerily familiar and yet that run comes to an end with a scoreline we have seen twice before in recent years against the same club. But these are not the numbers games that concern me the most at the moment. At half time we had precisely ten players out injured. That is a hefty tally whoever you are and to carry on and win well deserves some credit.

Now I don’t want to be disparaging here but it almost seems as if the Wigan players are trained to lose four nil to us before they even arrive. Therefore I don’t feel inclined to shower plaudits on Rooney and Ronaldo for their performances, they were just doing their jobs.

On his debut and again against Coventry Anderson played good through balls that nobody go onto which I though would start paying off soon. One did against Wigan and suddenly he is a hero, let’s hope it starts to happen more regularly. What I like is that he seems to have put in his best performance so far a week after Fergie has gone public saying he doesn’t know if he will make it or not. Master man management again? I like to think so.

Far more encouraging for me was the quality of the cross that Simpson put in for the first goal, it reminded me of seeing Lee Sharpe put in that cutback against Norwich some 19 years ago in making me think ‘he’s one to keep an eye on’.

Ferdinand for PM.

There was a great deal to be encouraged about from this performance. Roma were definitely up for it and from where I was sitting there was not a great deal of difference in the quality of play between the two teams.

The difference was an absolutely spectacular goal from Wayne Rooney. I honestly don’t think he could have hit it better and it reminded me of the strike he hit against Milan last season, Fergie said the same thing. What he didn’t say was that Wayne didn’t even look up before he shot and that it was a flawless finish. As I said, encouraging.

It would be remiss of me not to mention that Roma could and should have scored two goals in the last ten minutes and only didn’t because of some asthmatic choking in front of goal. So we were lucky then? Perhaps, but you may remember that we played those last ten minutes without Ronaldo.

So two good wins out of two and a great start to this years Champions League campaign. It was after a similar start last year that we managed to lose to both Celtic and Copenhagen. I wonder if they will make us suffer again this year, it is after all, United.