Fletcher Wins It For United

Portsmouth 0 - Manchester United 1
Scorer
Manchester United: Fletcher (32)

Team: Van der Sar, Rio, Vidic, Brown, Evra, Scholes, O'Shea, Anderson (Possebon 77), Fletcher, Rooney, Tevez

Who needs Ronaldo? In a game that was really going nowhere, Fletcher stamped his mark on the game, scoring in the 32nd minute, meeting Evra's low cross at the near post. It's the second time in successive games that he's stepped up when the team needed a scorer most.

We injury list grows as we missed Giggs and Carrick, both injured in the last fixture. We had to draft Anderson into the starting lineup due to a severe lack of personnel in midfield. Portsmouth too missed Kranjcar, but it was equalized with us playing O'Shea in midfield.

The opening exchanges were fast and furious, but neither team created any noteworthy chances. It wasn't until Fletcher's goal that we begun to dominate possession. In fact for the rest of the game, we held on to possession well but simply were not able to breech the Pompey defense...or rather, we simply didn't have the necessary firepower to put the game away.

It got particularly worrying when Pompey had a few long range efforts that troubled Van der Sar and threatened to undo all our good work. But in the end, they too lacked the necessary oomph upfront.

In other news, apparently Manucho has gotten his work permit settled. Unfortunately, he's got a broken foot and unavailable for sometime. Apparently it's the dreaded metatarsal. We've also less than a week before we know for sure if we'd be getting Mr Sourpuss, Berbatov. I'm not too keen on this locker room cancer, but at this point, we so desperately need help up front that I wouldn't mind dealing with devil himself.

In 4 days time, we'd be playing in the UEFA Super Cup against Zenit St Petersburg and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Fletcher pulls another one out of the hat.