Another final against Barca and another defeat by a two goal margin, but if we are being honest if it had been a five goal margin we couldn't have complained. If we thought we had been played off the park in Rome, we hadn't seen anything as we received a real football drubbing even if the scoreline doesn't really show it. For some reason i'm not as gutted as was after the 2-0 in Rome, i can only think it's because at least Fergie selected a team to try and take the game to the Catalans. The one thing i didn't want us to do was pack the midfield and defend like mad hoping to replicate Real Madrid Copa del Ray triumph. I didn't want United succumbing to the anti football tactics of Mourinho even if it meant getting a thumping that we got.
Don't get me wrong i'm not against a 4-3-3 and i don't want to see us conceeding the majority of possession as we did on Saturday night. But to play that 4-3-3 you need three interchangeable forwards as we had with Ronaldo and without better central midield players we may have had more possession but would we have been any more dangerous, i couldn't see it.
We may well have received the lesson we received anyway as that Barca team is truly something else, but we all worried about the lack of a midfield signing at the beginning of the season. And the one thing Fergie must surely take from that final is we have strengthen that central midfield with real class not just with numbers. I suppose he will have to decide how far from first team action Pogba, Tunnicliffe and Morrison are and decide how many players he really needs to buy in the summer. With Scholes intentions not known but thought to be favouring retiring and Giggs showing that at the very top level he didn't have the legs to match Barca's phenomenal work rate surely Fergie must go all out to buy a Modric or Sniejder. To be honest if he can't snare either of those two i'm not sure he will buy anyone as there just don't seem to be world class central midfiled growing off trees. He could always unearth a midield equivalent of Hernandez but it's an experienced ready made man we really need not an unpolished diamond. Hopefully we have got the unpolished diamonds in our victorious FA youth cup team.
As for the night i was disappointed with the poor atmosphere at our end and the amount of muppets in our end. There seemed to be a lot of people who weren't proper fans and even worse some who weren't United fans at all. I'm still not sure how we were successful in the ballot looking at the make up of our end and even the type of reds i saw in the two boozers i went in before the match. It was no Nou camp 99, but this is the United of the Glazer's and it won't be going away any time soon i guess.
My thoughts on the game were that unlike some journalists who thought we played well for the first ten minutes and though we just managed to stop them playing for the first ten minutes. Slowly but surely Barca took a stranglehold of the game with United reduced to long punts which apparently was the tactic. With Hernandez up front and Berbatov not even on the bench i'm still struggling really to understand that. We needed to try and keep for as much as we could if only to try and interrupt their rhythm. Poor defensive play aside the first goal had been coming, the one surprise of the first half was that we went in level with such a great goal. Rooney and Hernandez lived off scraps all night so it's hard to judge their games except to say Rooney did as much as he could but we needed all eleven starters to play somewhere near their best.
Park ran around a lot but unlike in the premiership his energy was totally unproductive against the tiki-taki of Guardiola's Barca and then we were left with somebody who doesn't really offer much of an attacking threat. Valencia was a big disappointment, i'm a big fan but he had a bit of a shocker. Giggs was anonymous and showed how big a miss Fletcher was in midfield even if we would then have been short of any kind of creativity in the middle of the park . At the back i thought Evra had another very iffy game, he definitely isn't the player who had two such outstanding displays to his name against Barca in the 2008 semi. Van Der Sar was blamed by some for the second but ihad a pretty good view of that on the night and the TV pictures don't reall show how hard Messi hit that, add to that Vidic blocked his view and i wouldn't have that down as a mistake.
The second half was the reason i wanted Barca to win the semi final against Real, because there was always a chance that our midfield would be showed up on the big stage. And boy were we shown up, but for it to be Barca to be killing us with their beautiful game softened the blow a bit. I have to say when the third went in i thought it was going to be a humiliation, thankfully they couldn't find the net again to leave the scoreline looking less like the thumping which in reality it was.
I suppose it has to be mentioned that whoever the opposition was, this was yet another underwhelming performance by us at the new Wembley, I have yet to see us win there.
Gary Neville and Roy Keane both TV pundits for the night were blown away by the brilliance of the Barcelona performance on the night. Neville mentioned how important it was that seven of those players had come through the ranks at the club. Keane rated Barcelona as the best team he had ever seen and thought that might help soften the blow. With Fergie in charge i hope that isn't the case. Fergie joined in the praise on the night though, hailing this Barca team as the best he had ever faced and joining the chorus of pundits hailing Barca as the best team in Europe and the world. It must be hard being a Madrista at the moment. He also admitted we never got near Messi all night, but we aren't the only ones to complain about that. He has used Saturday night as the moment to resurrect his old arguments about the structure of Academy level football in this country. Martin Samuel thought it was possible to come away with even more admiration for Ferguson even after a night such as that as all Fergie could think about was the challenge ahead that Barca have posed. Andy Mitten wrote credit Barca, brilliant but not arrogant.
Alex Stepney doesn't blame Edwin van Der Sar for the second goal and praises the big Dutchman's career at United and his career overall. He has been a magnificent, a big big factor in our defensive excellence since 2007.
Daniel Taylor wonders what now for Dmitar Berbatov after he couldn't even make the bench in front of Michael Owen on Saturday night. Which is still only understanable to me as being Fergie's message to Berbatov that he would like him to leave the club. Michael Owen wants to prolong his spell at the club and the rumours are that Fergie may grant his wish.
For all the gushing praise, rightly so, Paul Wilson was the only journalist to look at the manager's reluctance to address the central midfiled that almost every United fan can see is not good enough. As he points out we can't go on and on relying on Giggs and Scholes. I still don't want Scholes to retire but if that led to Fergie having to spend money to bring a Modric or a Sneijder in at least there would be some good to come out of it. I suppose in the piece above i never mentioned Cleverley, i haven't forgotten about him, i just don't want to see him burdened with the pressure of being the new Paul Scholes. I'd like to see him being given time to find his feet with the first team next season, and i'm hoping that he lives up to the promise some of us have invested in him.
I can't really say i felt like watching the parade to nowhere yesterday , thanks council, but i'm glad i and the tousands of others made the effort. As someone mentioned on red iss mesageboard yesterday, the difference between the way the United players seemed to enjoy it, even in the lousy weather and the the way the City squad seemed to be bored out of their minds at their's shows the spirit at our club.
Pictures from yesterday, the bus being accompanied by a decent following of reds
And finally the team heading towards talbot road from Warwick road
Peter Oborne wasn't impressed by our parliamentarians and the establishment's star struck reaction to the state visit of President Obama claiming that this isn't a special relationship it's sinister and sychophantic.
Vince Cable gave an interesting interview to the New Statesman last wekk where he voiced the reasonable assumption that the public have not been really told how sick our economy now is after the credit crunch. The country is poorer and all of us as individuals are poorer for the bail out of the bakers. It's pretty obvious he doesn't think the economic transformation has even got started yet and his claim that we may yet have another crash tells me that he thinks the financial elite have still not learnt their lesson and the politicians have still not took the neccessary measures to bring them to heel.
Larry Elliott looks at how the forces of economic orthodoxy have fought back since the crisis and how putting the country at risk of stagnation.
Will Hutton argues that we know what Labour is against, now it must show the country a vision of what it is for.
Yet another article on the wealth disparity that exists in this country, the richest 1%.
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