The Devil In Me

Satan has not risen from hell to assume control of earth. No nuclear missiles have been launched by the world’s superpowers, nor is there a large asteroid on a collision course with the planet. In short, Armageddon is not here yet, this is not the end of the world. However, United have now served up two pretty stale performances in a week and a mild inquest is in order.

Congratulations if you saw this coming because I certainly did not. A month ago we did draw attention to the large number of games we were playing and the result against our beloved neighbours marked the end of a month in which we played two games a week. It is the second such period we have survived so far and understandably I think the players are all knackered. 

The results up until now have been stupendous but seasoned United watchers will have observed that we are yet to hit anything like top form. I suppose we all expected that to kick in at some point or other but unfortunately the opposite has happened.

A wounded animal would have gone straight at Fullham and torn them to shreds yesterday. In the first half United looked like prisoners recently released from a Taliban cave. They wandered around blindly as if the sight of sunshine was something they hadn’t seen for a while. Fulham are a well organised outfit and took advantage of this. Scholes, great man that he is, behaved like a bit of a pillock.

The rabid hyperbole that has accompanied the result against Liverpool last weekend may have seeped into the players minds a little and I would say, from the looks of things, that they are more angry with themselves rather than anything else. Fergie should be able to get them back together again and we are still in with a shout in all the competitions but Aston Villa’s role in this championship is now critical.

This is a blip we are going through and certainly not a pleasant one. But we need to get out of it straight away because frankly, teams that start stuttering in March are teams that throw away league titles.

Honestly, I am doing everything I can here. I have stopped reading the newspapers, a brick has been thrown through the screen of the TV and I have managed to block out all radio broadcasts to my house. But somehow this word ‘quintuple’ keeps coming back into my consciousness. It is not going to stop. With performances like this one we are doomed to the build up for this outrageous trophy bid.

If you had asked any normal red what they wanted for this season they would have replied, quite simply, for that 18th league title and some way to erase the memory of Ronaldo’s antics during the summer. Our odds with betfair for the league title are now 1/33, which is utterly absurd, and some bright spark has even paid out on us collecting the domestic treble. How the hell do you keep calm in the middle of all this lunacy?

United are starting to resemble Alexander the Great’s lustful quest for power across the entire known world. Famously, after his billionth superb military victory, ‘big Al’ (as his generals liked to call him) “wept, for he had no more worlds to conquer.” Well diddums. Our own Alex (Sir, as his generals like to call him) does not seem on the verge of tears. He has, however, revealed something that has not been in his repertoire previously. Fear. What is Ferguson sacred of? Is it Chelsea under Hiddink? Barcelona’s goal machine? Sneaky Mourinho’s master-plan for Old Trafford?

Nope, none of the above. Ferguson is afraid of retiring. It is unlikely the rest of the management fraternity looks upon this with any kind of triumphant joy. I can see visions of heavyweight boxers punching long dead opponents hours after the bell has been rung before shrugging their shoulders and saying with tearful eyes “I’m sorry, I’m scared to stop hitting you.” Fergie is indeed a psychopath, but he is our psychopath and we love him. He is obviously so addicted to the adrenalin of winning that he can no longer stop. Perhaps if he ever does retire he could co-star with Jason Statham in Crank 2, the sequel to the movie where our hero had to keep his heart rate above a certain level to stay alive.

With the world gone quintuple mad, cats and dogs living together, oceans boiling, mountains crumbling and a decent president in the White House perhaps we do have a place for this United juggernaut. It will hurt me later, I am sure it will, but I give in. Okay, the quin-flipping-tuple is on!

Footnote: I reserve the right to amend this article after Wednesday night.

Back in the 80s Carling was an entirely different company. Their beer was invariably connected to superhuman feats of derring do in absolutely fantastic adverts such this one:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/aY9GBl7UmVs" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

And, in an act of foresight quite improbable, they even managed to include an early Ben Foster in this one:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/qKHc-U2FNHk" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Today, the beer now hides behind the shiny gloss of 21st Century marketing but there are those of us who recall when it was associated with being a bit of a legend.

The association between Carling and legends is alive and well though. What a fantastic keeper Ben Foster is. The last time United really tested him he came off the bench two seasons ago, and did fine well, but to recover from the injury lay-off he has had is phenomenal. What a performance.

United came out of the traps flying in this game but we ran out of puff pretty quickly. There hasn’t really been the cutting edge of last season all this term and it showed again today. In my head I have been saying that this is down to the fixture pile-up (and I believe that it is) but these games are not going to go away just because we are tired.

All in all, you have to give the best chances of the game to Spurs, and were it not for our third choice goalie the trophy would be in London now. It isn’t, and Ferguson’s haul of trophies is now somewhere in the gajillions.

The reality is though, a team near the bottom of the premiership took us to penalties in a cup final. I don’t think for a second that Spurs should be where they are in the league but if we can’t break them down in two hours what on earth are we going to do with Inter?

We have a lot of tired players at the moment, Evra, Ronaldo, Scholes, Ferdinand and Tevez all played the full 120 minutes. Will it cost us down the line? I am not sure.

What a cracking game. The season is really starting to come alive now and everything that happened in the last six months was just practice. Some of United’s movement tonight was wonderful and our boys in the stands of the San Siro did us proud too. Several times during the first half the Red Army out-sang their Italian counterparts and that is no mean feat in a stadium that size.

There are no words to describe how much respect I have for Darren Fletcher at the moment. Less than 24hrs after his house was burgled and his fiancée held at knifepoint, the man takes the field in a foreign land to defend the shirt. Nobody could have blamed him if he was on the first flight back to Manchester but he stayed and got on with it. O’Shea too deserves special mention, he has never let us down this guy and on at least two occasions he made vital clearing headers from a position that he is not entirely familiar with.

We have learnt that Fergie is getting wilier and wilier in his old age but we aren’t the only learners here. Inter’s players have seen ours up close now and they will certainly have a better idea of what to expect at Old Trafford. For all the talk of us being a much stronger team, any element of surprise we had is well and truly gone now.

On the plus side, Ronaldo has really started to stand up in the big games now [insert pun here] and our hashed together defence managed to keep their wolves at bay. But,
we did have an awful lot of free-kicks that we didn’t score from and that is going to cause me some sleepless nights over the next two weeks.

“Should” is a helluva big word in English. We really should have scored tonight. Time and again we have seen how important the away goal is in European football and we are palpably going home without one. Having played pretty well we now brandish some kind of moral victory which essentially means nothing.

The majority of United fans were a little worried before this game and we needn’t have been. Our biggest sin going into the second leg would be overconfidence. There is no suggestion that this will be a cakewalk from here on in but we are entitled to at least feel relieved we weren’t beaten. However, you should never underestimate Mourinho.

The significance of this result cannot be overstated. We have utterly murdered the very team who were short favourites to win the league this year. Incredibly, this was not a particularly classy display from United, but it was more than enough to do the job.

Berbatov was involved in all three goals and after his recent contributions I estimate that he has been worth about 9 points over the last month. That is not 30 million pounds but it is important.

Having been behind all season we can now be top of the league by teatime on Saturday provided we win our games in hand.

It is a lot of fixtures in a short anount of time but I think we can do it. If they do, then I think we can all forgive them for that result at Derby.

Manchester United returned from Tokyo as Champions of the world but were nearly taught a lesson in the basics of football at the Britannia Stadium this Boxing Day. United emerged victorious with a late goal from Carlos Tevez in a fractious and ill-tempered local derby with Stoke City after Andy Wilkinson’s sending off.

United can count themselves lucky that it was a player in red and white stripes who recieved his marching orders after both Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo had done their best to earn straight reds themselves. Rooney could easily have been dismissed for aiming an elbow at Abdoulaye Faye, which the referee chose to ignore, and Ronaldo could similarly have been punished after kicking out at Wilkinson minutes before the Stoke man retaliated.

United managed to put their numerical advantage to the good by sending on Dimitar Berbatov whose bag of tricks made an immediate difference with one sublime flick setting up Rooney for a narrowly wide drive. The game looked to be petering out before Berbatov again teed the ball up from a Gary Neville cross before poking the ball across the goal for Tevez to drive home. The relief was palpable and only after the goal did the United support begin to find voice, before they had surely been fearing their side’s third stalemate of the season.

The pace of the game was frantic from the start with Stoke closing down every United move at lightening speed in an attempt to expose the weariness of a team that had just flown half-way across the world. Inspirational centre-half Rio Ferdinand was ruled out shortly before kick off with a back strain so 19-yr-old Johnny Evans was called on to replace him and looked unprepared for the contest. Despite his encouraging displays in other matches, Evans was exposed on more than one occasion and were it not for the presence of the bruising Nemanja Vidic and a resurgent Gary Neville his mistakes could have been costly.

The second half saw an even match degenerate with increasingly frayed tempers. United were clearly becoming frustrated and the theatrics of some had got the home players riled. Several cards were shown and a red was inevitable after Wilkinson swept Ronaldo away for his second bookable offence. All that was left was for a Berbatov cameo and Tevez’s second goal of the season. After a tough afternoon a drowsy Manchester United are now back at home and still very much in the title race.

Roy Keane would have been livid if he had played in this game. Where was the indignation? We have now registered six billion shots without scoring a goal and somebody needs a kick up the backside. Redknapp is still the same wily old git but we should have had way too much for them in this game. Despite playing at home their plan was to defend and hit on the break. It nearly worked too, Lennon is wedding night quick and Bentley can shoot from distance very competently. Fortunately, this was a good day for Edwin, he made several good saves and looked considerably sharper than he did at the start of the season.

We are a different team without Rooney, for all of our worries about his temperament he unsettles our opponents brilliantly and we have no one else who does that job right now. I thought we were greatly improved after Giggs came on, his passing is flawless at the moment and his six corners were considerably more menacing than Park’s seven, if only we hadn’t taken of Tevez to make room for him I am sure we would have scored.

Heroes of the day were O’Shea and Rafael, we had a makeshift defence too, but those guys put in performances of such quality that you wouldn’t have known it. This bodes well for the future but we are a wafer-thin third and the year is about to turn. 18, lest we forget.

We should definitely have done more damage to Spurs after Woodgate went off but for some reason heir makeshift defence managed to withstand us. United are playing far from well at the moment but take heed of this fact. Last year Real Madrid won La Liga despite playing badly all season by virtue of no decent rivals being present. Looking around the table at the moment you would have to say that we are still in with a chance. Unfortunately, somebody is going to have play Barcelona in Europe, and whoever does that is going to be killed.

Seeing as we had already qualified and seem to be treating scoring like the plague at the moment I was expecting a fairly dull contest. Some clairvoyant me, this was a great match. AalBorg have got the basics of their game extremely well polished, their set-pieces were dangerous and a spirit level would find no fault in their defence pushing up the pitch.

But we have workers too. When Rooney is tearing around the pitch at full-pelt he looks like he could tear through walls and not even notice. His finish for the equaliser was as brutal and quick as his best but most encouragingly it was set up up deftly by Anderson’s through ball. The dreadlocked one is starting to get more consistent now and I can see him bossing European games in the future. Mind you, I am not much of a clairvoyant.

Tevez’s goal was a peach and made the cost of the ticket worthwhile on its own. Nobody works harder than this guy and I would be amazed if he does not start against Spurs. There is nothing more he can do to earn it.

This was a tale of two defences really. Dick Advocaat knows a thing or two about organising a backline and Zenit were brick like in defence all night. Gary Neville’s latest return was rather a nervy one and he needlessly conceded the corner that led to their first goal. Alas poor Rio, immense all game but criminally at fault for no. 2. It must be a pretty thankless task being a defender, he will be getting grief about his fabled ‘concentration lapses’ for months now and he was brilliant for every other minute of the match.

Criticisms of United not producing a final product at the moment are founded. Every time Rooney had the ball he was playing from the half-way line at the left hand side of the field, I just cannot make any sense of that. With Nani, and latterly Park, on the pitch we should have the wingers to provide service for a front man – yet it is now glaringly obvious that after 4 games no Manchester United striker has scored this season.

This was a pretty tough game and the Reds really didn’t seem up for it. Zenit kept frustrating us and Scholes (Rio-esque, great game, 1 bad mistake) certainly didn’t cover himself in glory. Perhaps it was the strange nature of the occasion or perhaps it was simply that we got beat, but could there be a growing feeling of discontent going through the squad right now? I hope not, but Friday was an all round glum experience, I hope it proves to be an isolated incident.

We are a superstitious bunch football fans. The game is so intellectualised and anaylysed nowadays that people seem to have lost sight of the importance of lucky socks, or standing in the right place in the pub, or more simply just seeing the game with your mates. It is the prevalence of omens in football, more than any of the above, that keep our superstitious juices flowing. What is more, there are simply too many to ignore their significance, the year is lucky for Spurs when it ends in one, England will always lose in a penalty shootout, and any team that was lucky enough to have Stanley Matthews in it will not win a trophy again, ever.

So it is wistfully that I cast my eye over the delicious list of omens we have stacked up in the last 24 hours.
-The last time the title was up for grabs, and involving United, on the last day was 99. We went on to win the European cup.
-The last time two teams went into the final day of the season on equal points was 68. We went on to win the European Cup.
-The last time United won away 2-0 on the last day of the season (03/04 vs Aston Villa). We went on to win the cup final we were playing in.

Other than that, it would be rude not to join in the all United love in that last days of the season have started to become. Giggs scoring was a nice touch and although he has come in for a bit of stick for his recent performances his form at the start of the season, lest we forget, was very strong. He was also magnificent all of last season.

And yes they did make us suffer again, the goal line clearance and Ferdinand’s givage of a penalty made us look a little bit lucky. The best part of the day was the Moonraker-clad Ferguson talking about how much more hunger he has to win trophies, fantastic. In the meantime I’ll be looking for my lucky socks.