United Rounds Up Tour With A Loss

Chivas de Guadalajara 3 - Manchester United 2

Am down with a pretty bad flu, so will try to make this as brief as humanly possible. If the last game's atmosphere was good, this one blew it out of the water. The atmosphere was simply superb. There was a parade before the game to open the new stadium and the fans were all given either a red or white t-shirt in Chivas' home colours. It resulted in an explosion of red and white in the stadium, a feast for the eyes.

As for the game itself, Chivas was clearly the better team. Chicharito played in their colours in the first half and he scored a brilliant volley to open the scoring. Smalling levelled the scores almost immediately thru a corner, but Chivas closed the stronger team in the half and went into the lead with a well-deserved goal, albeit miles offside.

In the second half, Hernandez switched jerseys but was no where near as effective. We were hardly able to find him the ball. In truth we were pretty woeful at creating chances throughout the game. It wasn't a surprise that Chivas found the net again, before Nani pulled one back to make the scoreline respectable.

The results in this preseason tour is no where near what or how we would perform when the season starts proper. A whole host of players will be returning from their World Cup exertions, and preseason is going to start proper back in England.

However from this tour, we get a good gauge of the youngsters in the team. While most of them are as we expected, some probably have exceeded our expectation, there are a couple that have me worried. Players like Diouf and Rafael seemed to have played themselves out of the team. Ok, Rafael isn't that bad, but I can't possibly see how Diouf is going to fight for a place in the team. With the addition of Hernandez, and the upcoming talents of Welbeck and Macheda, I simply cannot see Diouf breaking into the team. Berbatov, Rooney and Owen are far too established, while the 3 young ones are just more talented. Diouf definitely has to be the first casualty of this tour.