West ham 2-1 Manchester United

Back to earth with a bump, after a cracking day that saw almost everything go our way on boxing day, yesterday saw almost everything go wrong. I thought we had took west ham too lightly when i saw the team, no Anderson in midfield and Rooney not even on the bench, but apparently Rooney and Carrick had been struck down by a virus, so we can only blame the manager for not having Anderson in the starting eleven for what was the hardest fixture over the Christmas period.
I had expected this to be a hard game, and was hoping that we would be on good form. It was hard to know whether we were in decent touch as the Sunderland game had been so easy. Right from the off you knew we were, indeed in for a hard game, with West Ham crowding the midfield and stopping United getting any rhythm. There wasn't much fluency, and Tevez in particular seemed to slip way below what we have come to expect from him, holding onto the ball too long and not getting many telling passes in. Apparently he received an excellent welcome back to Upton Park, the consensus seems to be it was so good, it put him off his game. If that's so, let's hope he gets it out of his system the next time we play them. We had a scare early on as Mullins managed to get himself free in the box but he only managed to hit the bar, the resulting rebound fell to the feet of noble who blasted over the bar when he should have at least hit the target. But apart from that scare, there wasn't too much threat from the home team. Not that we doing that much better.
Then out of nowhere United managed to put their one quality counter attack of the game together to take the lead. Saha managed to find Giggs in acres of space on the left, and raced forward before delivering a perfect cross to find Ronaldo running into the box, and he made no mistake with a fine firm header. The game now became a tight affair with West ham creating the marginally better chances, forcing Kuszczak into fine save from a dipping Solano shot. The closest United came was when Giggs failed to control a through pass that would have put him clean through on goal. So as the teams went off at half time we were pleased to be one up.
The second half was the big disappointment for me, fair enough we didn't play well, but the substitutions and tactics just made things worse and contributed to that last dismal quarter of an hour where we just completely lost any grip on the game that we had . As poorly as we continued to play, West Ham were not troubling us to the same extent as in the first half and had hardly created a thing up the point the equaliser went in. When we got that penalty, after a bad mistake from Spector, i thought that would be it, three points in the bag, but when he missed it you worried that it may come back to haunt us. Not to the extent it did though.
The substitution of Tevez completely baffled me and still does, he wasn't playing well, that i won't deny and probably deserved to be subbed, but not by Anderson, a midfielder. And then reverting to the dreaded 4-5-1, and a real negative 4-5-1, everybody behind the ball playing for 1-0 leaving Saha up front on his own. From then on in we just completely handed the initiative to the home team, inviting them to come at us. And with nobody breaking forward from midfield when we did get the ball, we totally lost any threat going forward. And when they did equalise we had to reorganise the side and tactics again, and this time we became totally disorganised. Although both goals came from set pieces, those set pieces came about from the pressure we allowed West Ham to impose on us. At least if Tevez as poorly as he had played had stayed on, West ham would have had to leave one or two midfield players deeper to look after him. We never really looked like we had a goal in us after that and our third defeat on the trot duly arrived when the ref blew his whistle. With Chelsea winning in the last minute, and then Arsenal managing to win 4-1 at Goodison when they supposedly didn't play much better than us, it was a bad day all round.

Stop the partying warns Fergie
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/sport/football.html?in_article_id=505128&in_page_id=1779
I think it's fair to say that is probably aimed at Ferdinand as much as anybody.

A decent article by David James in the observer about stats and them telling only half the story
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/sport/story/0,,2233385,00.html

Motherwell captain Phil O'Donnel collapses and dies
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/7164820.stm
very sad

Robert Fisk on the hypocrisy of western leaders blaming al-Qa'ida, whilst many Pakistanis are blaming Musharaf. I wouldn't rush to blame either, but that's the point isn't it, there are such a myriad of forces who alone or conspiring together could have perpetrated the assassination, nobody really has a clue who has done it. But Bush, Brown et al cynically use it, to divert their voters from their disastrous foreign policies
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article3291600.ece

Another bank in trouble
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/dec/30/merrilllynch.subprimecrisis

William Dalrymple on the flawed Benazir Bhutto
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2233261,00.html

Henry porter on the proposed bill to criminalise prostitutes clients
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2233229,00.html

Nick Cohen on her majesties revenue and customs
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2233253,00.html