Re: Manchester United Supporters Thread.
Thoughts:
The bad things
I'm not a football manager. I'm certainly not the best that has ever lived (Sir Fergie). But I would have thought maybe telling the boys to put pressure on the man with the ball against hte best pass and move team in the world would have been a good idea. What the hell were we doing? Standing off of them, allowing them to move behind us...who's plan was that?
We didn't show up. Ando, Giggs and Park were absolutely woeful. And therefore there was nothing for Rooney and Ronaldo to do. As good as those two are, they can't do it all themselves against 5 men.
We never laid seige. We never hinted at that 99 spirit of alright, it's our time to score. We went down 2-0 and gave up. The rest of the match was played at walking pace.
Puyol. What a disgrace. Is it something about Barcelona right backs? He won the Drogba award for gaining over 10 minutes of wasted time for his team, all by himself through feigning injury. Get up you girly-man.
Ji-Sung Park is a great athelete. Reads the game of football well. Tries really hard. But his attacking skill with a football places him somewhere behind (deep breath): Nani, Berba, Tevez, Macheda and Welbeck. I'm tempted to add Fabio and Rafael into that. So in the final of the CL, why is he playing? Sympathy? Fergie - wtf?!
Fergie played the formation everyone expected, and it failed spectacularly. I was absolutely sure there would be a twist, but we set up to neutralise Barca. That's not the United way. That's not using our best strengths. It was just negative, and you know what? It was cowardly. That’s what I’m most annoyed about. That with the team we have, we’d show that much fear.
Vidic has had an outstanding year, but made 3 big mistakes. Fortunately the two against Pool didn’t hurt us in the end, but last night’s was unforgivable. Everyone who has ever played knows you show the attacker wide, not into the middle. What an idiot.
The good things
We made it to the semis or finals of every competition we entered this season, played more games than any other club in Europe, won the league and some other cups and occasionally looked really quite good.
Hopefully Fergie will spend the summer thinking about his cowardice, his new found negativity. Yes, it works for Rafa and it worked for Jose – but that’s because they have mastered the negative arts. Fergie has never been good at it – got lucky last year in the CL semi. I remember when the ‘fab four’ were mentioned I just wondered as a defense which one you double team. You can’t double team them all, and they all need it. By only playing two of them, one out wide where he’s useless, you give them a very easy job. All I want is for Fergie to grow some balls again. Barcelona, with their depleted defense, would have been genuinely worried had we at least put out 3 attacking players. It would have forced the midfield to think about their defensive duties. But instead we basically said – alright you guys attack and we’ll defend. It was awful, AWFUL tactically.
If we’d won, what would the players be playing for next year?
Ronaldo tried really quite hard, and deserves credit. If messi hadn't scored, I actually thought Ronnie was more impressive on an individual level.
you.
