Barcelona 3-1 Manchester United

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

Me waiting in the rain
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%.

Giggs in the news still !

James Lawton writes that the fans will forgive Ryan Giggs if he does the business on Saturday, he has enough good will in the bank. He has nothing to forgive, his personal life is his own, i have never moralised about other people's private lifes, especially when it comes to sex. I think most United fans wouldn't be a million miles away from that position.
How much money has he been paying his lawyers for such rank bad service though, without the challenge to Twitter the rumours would almost certainly have just stayed internet rumours. Max Clifford a man with his grubby fingers all over this episode, thinks without the superinjunction none of this would have come out, are we really expected to believe that she didn't want to name him.
David Allen Green of the New Statesman asks if there is now any point to a privacy law or do we just let the tabloids and their grubby owners win. Alistair Campbell claims that the lack of reporting on the phone hacking scandal and the media frenzy that has accompanied this shows theit true agenda, sex and celebs. Or the dumbing down that was the thesis of Nick Davies's brilliant analysis of our current media in Flat earth news. John Lloyd of the FT hopes that we resist the tyranny of the media and the web. It's hard to be confident of that with our craven political class, Cameron showed his true colours over this episode, firmly in Murdoch's pocket.
At least this lot of shithouses got what was coming to them, hilarious. That MP seems to have got off lightly so far.

Mark Ogden thinks that Ryan Giggs will need all his ruthless single mindedness to weather this storm. But you get the feeling from that piece that he believes he is capable of, i think and hope he is right, because he is going to be one of our key players on Saturday.
Ian Herbert thinks the issue could destabilise United's preperations for Saturday if they allow them to. I really cannot see that happening. If we lose it will be because we were beaten by a better team. As his colleague James Lawton wrote attacking the press is his trusted way of defending his players and Robert de Niro couldn't have done it any better.


Nemanja Vidic told the press that United are ready for the challenge of the opposition's different mentality at Wembley. We'll see, but i find it hard to believe that we will see anything like the perfomance we saw from both sides in El Classico. If United really do outnumber them in the stands by as much as some people think it probably wouldn't be a very good idea anyway.
At the same press event Fergie told the press that we will be able to handle Messi, but Barca have other great players too such as Xavi, Iniesta and Villa. He doesn't thin them being favourites gives them any advantage. If Rome is anything to go by that's right, because their defensive injuries that night must have made us favourites and in the end we were comprehensively beaten.
Fergie keeps on pointing out that we have great players too and they will have to be wary of us too. And that is the way i want us to approach this game with Hernandez up front and Rooney in the hole spraying the ball about when we have it. Our best performances and best results have all come when we have played with that team and in that formation. With our current personnel we just don't seem to click as well in a 4-3-3, i am not saying we can't win with that formation, we probably can, i just think it's ore likely that we will give Barca more problems with a 4-4-2 and Hernandez up front.
Jonathan Wilson looks at the tactical options that are available to Fergie on Saturday and i think presumes that Fergie will play Hernandez with Rooney behind in a 4-4-1-1, fascinating as ever.I still think he will play Giggs in front of Fletcher as i don't think Fletcher is match sharp enough anyway.

Sarurday will be Edwin Van Der Sar's last ever game and what a way to end it, we all know from the past you don't always get fairy tale endings, but if anyone deserves one, he does. The rumours from Spain over the last coouple ofdays were confirmed by Fergie yesterday, our new number one will be David de Gea of Athletico Madrid who will sign on July 1st. I'd be lying if i pretend i have seen much of him. I'm surprised Fergie has gone for someone so young and whose grasp of English isn't so hot apparently. I hope we have got this right, i haven't read how good he is with his feet, because to me that's nearly as important as how good with your hands as a goalie nowadays.

The Independent looks at the next generation of United youngsters after United's 10th FA youth cup final victory and gives a quick profile of the five most likely to make it. I love the fact that four of those five are Mancunians, i don't know all five will make United's first team but they all have a real chance. The one with the biggest challenge would be Thorpe, it will depend how he fills out and grows as much as his development.
I must admit as terrific a prospect as Morrison is, even with all the baggage that seems to go with him at present, Tunnicliffe is the one really exciting me. If he makes it he could be the domineering box to box midfield we have been praying for.

Ahead of Saturday's game the Mail have a couple of pages devoted to Sir Bobby Charlton, the most interesting part of which gives his all time Manchester United X1 he still thinks that Duncan Edwards was was the greatest player he ever saw.
Another hero of the 68 Wembley final Nobby Stiles talks to James Lawton about doing what has to be done and how he thinks will be ready for Saturday night.

Evra reveals that the rumours were true that he wanted to leave last summer, but he is glad that Fergie perusaded him to stay. I'll bet he is, he hasn't been the same player this season though, and i'm sure that Fergie will have his eye on that.
The republic of Sila household is interviewed in the Guardian, i didn't realise they all live together, i hope Fabio is picked at right back.

United in new treating fans like shit shocker

Manchester United 4-2 Blackpool

A strange game really, i expected us to be better than that. A better team than Blackpool might have come away with something from that game. We have seen it before, when United have nothing to play for, the intensity drops and the result you expected doesn't always happen.
I was surprised that Park played as i thought he would be rested for next week, but it was the Korean who opened the scoring after getting on the end of a Berbatov flick on with a little help from a terrible piece of defending from Evatt that showed why Blackpool have lasted just one season in the top flight. They have tried to play football the right way but you just can't defend like that. Presuming that there best players look for pastures new it's hard to see them playing in the premier league again any time soon.
United got sloppy though and Blackpool got the equaliser they probably deserved when Vidic gave away a free kick just outside the area in Charlie Adam territory. The Scot made no mistake with a brilliant left foot shot. United didn't start the second half any better and it wasn't that much of a surprise when the away team took the lead. The didn't hold the lead very long though as the all of a sudden goal hungry Anderson helped Park's left wing cross into the back of the net.
Owen came on for Park as United took control of the game finally and United took the lead with quarter of an hour to go as the unfortunate Evatt put through his own net. Owen finished the scoring with ten minutes to go. It wasn't Berbatov's day as he looked for the goal that would have made him the league's top scorer. Two good saves from the Blackpool goalie Gilks and a poor attempt that never threatened the goal late on meant that he ended all square with Tevez who also couldn't find the net for City at Bolton.
As usual the trophy presentation dragged on for far too long but it was nice to see Van Der Sar get a nice send off. Hopefully that was the first of three trophies to be claimed by the club this season.

I managed to get tonight off work and went along to see the second leg of the FA youth cup final at Old trafford. It was the first time i had seen the present youth team in the flesh. Despite the scoreline United didn't really play that well and were pretty fortunate to go in at half time 2-0 to the good. The second half was far better though United were still not playing anywhere near as well as they are capable of. They did start to carve out chances though with Pogba hitting a great shot that was well saved.
Morrison had a mixed night scoring two goals with two excellent finishes but losing possession carelessly at times. I was disappointed with Pogba, it just didn't seem to be his night and he knew it. Keane didnt affext the game as much as he can, but he was as cool as a cucumber taking the penalty and he took the second goal like a veteran. The man of the match for me, and by a long way had to be Tunnicliffe. He was superb, in almost every facet of the game, his passing and vision were a revelation to me. I have seen him drive the game and force himself onto a game, but he was also the conductor tonight directing the play with some great lomg and short range passing. I'm really excited by him and a local lad to boot.
I always love to see youth given its chance and next season promises to be exciting from that point of view. I didn't realise that we have marked another milestone and broken another record with this tenth FA youth cup triumph.

Gary Neville gives his views on the champions league final with Barca

United on defensive over Giggs super injunction ahead of Saturday's game.