The Devil In Me

Everything is just a little bit too early at the moment.  

My alarm sounds before I am ready for it, I get out of bed ahead of the desired time, work begins whilst I am still getting ready and of course then it starts to get dark soon after lunch.  It is also way too early to start making pronouncements like “this is the strongest squad I have ever assembled”.  Dear Lord, how we did not need that hanging over us this early in the season.

I agree that it has been a sound start, but it is only a start and I am not yet convinced that you can win anything with hubris. Judgments like that should be made, at the earliest, at the end of a season, but probably keeping them shelved until the end of a career is a better idea.

As a Red my confidence can be quite a fragile thing (inwardly that is) and I now fear that anybody who beats us going to enjoy ramming those words back down our throats. We will lose at some point. What’s more, and what’s more important, is that we have often been in the position of being found out in Europe when we were least expecting it. Folly indeed.

Having had to watch us score four goals against them in their half-built stadium in the Ukraine a couple of weeks ago I can find it in my heart to forgive Kiev for having a defensive game plan. Eight years ago this club were being spoken about as one of the more exciting teams in Europe. We murdered them in this game.

Ronaldo seemed to be getting angrier and angrier as the game wore on. He seems to react to frustration by playing better and scoring awesome goals. Fine by me. Keep up the good work.

I was not as nervous as I should have been before this game. Arsenal have been enjoying all of the plaudits this season whilst we have simply been getting on with our jobs I thought. Hargreaves has done nothing to make me question him and I even felt, especially after last week, that Anderson standing next to him would present no problems at all. I would also have taken a draw before the game, we all would.

Anderson’s cheeky head-butt on Abedayor in the first minute endeared him to me immensely, as did our ability to score a late goal. And it is possible that I am viewing the world through red-tinted glasses, but we seemed to control large spells of a game at the home of the Champions League’s most prolific scorers. That is certainly not bad, losing a late late goal always hurts but in a pure sense there are many reasons to be pleases about this result, right?

So why am I not that pleased right now? Because to win the big trophies, the League and the European Cup, you need a combination of three things. Inspiration, luck and belief. United displayed some inspired football on saturday with Rooney’s flick for Giggs sticking most prominently in the memory, but so did Arsenal. We were lucky too courtesy of Gallas’ handball skills, but so were Arsenal.

For ninety three minutes though, I was beginning to convince myself that this team is emerging as a great Old Trafford side, it almost certainly is, we believed we could just go to the Emirates and win. For ninety three minutes we showed that we could. And then they scored.

I am certain that in the league United have the belief to go with their talents, but the problem is so now do our main rivals, and we gave it to them.

I am not a statistician, nor am I a mathematician, I am barely even a gambling man. The sequence of United’s results this year has been weird.  Several one nils have become several four scores and now we are all happy, but of course we are.  

The quality of goals one and, particularly, three was truly stupendous in this game and now we can all shut up and agree with Fergie that Tevez and Rooney can play together. There have even been cries the length and breadth of the land to start lauding the football that ourselves and Arsenal are playing as not only the best thing since sliced bread, but perhaps the entire reason for life itself. Sure.

I am happy that we are playing nice football, goodness knows it has irked me we have not, and I am happy that we are winning comfortably. But Arsenal still having an advantage bothers me, memories of us hitting great form early in a season and then petering out bother me. And Paul Scholes being out indefinitely should bother us all.

Yes this is grand stuff at the moment, but if I started celebrating before there were any trophies in the cabinet I would not be a United fan, in fact I would be a pretty lousy sports fan all round. Football is at its best when you are winning matches that matter in the month of May. The Arsenal game is going to be interesting.

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.

All of the guff about United’s ‘Harlem Globetrotters’ eleven before the start of the season seems like a distant memory now. I am loathe to complain while the team is winning but in all honesty the best football played yesterday was by Birmingham.

United’s players didn’t seem to have the same level of hunger as theirs did and it told as our players were closed down quickly and effectively every time we ventured into the Birmingham half. They also thoroughly deserved a goal which were it not for a Beckenbauer like performance from Ferdinand would surely have come.

Again I am loathe to criticise an eighteen year old lad who has only been in the country for five minutes but the suspicion is beginning to grow in my mind that Anderson may well be Kleberson in disguise. When will we ever learn.

Points are points and again you can’t complain too much if they are getting results but I wonder if a decent team who are truly up for it might show us up a bit on current form. And I suppose the wounded beast that is Roma will be looking to do just that on tuesday.

Every single finger is crossed that these players start to find a bit of form, and now.