Silenced By Noisy Neighbours

Manchester City 1 - Manchester United 0
Scorer
Manchester City: Toure (52)

Red Card
Manchester United: (Scholes 72)


Team: Van der Sar, Rio, Vidic, O'Shea (Fabio 84), Evra, Scholes, Carrick, Park, Valencia (Hernandez 65), Nani, Berbatov (Anderson 74)

I had a bad feeling coming into this game. The moment I pressed the 'publish' button in the last post, I just had the feeling I would jinx the team just by typing in that damn word 'treble'. With this defeat, it looks like we'd just have to be content with the Premiership, that's if we don't fuck up the rest of the game.

While I think we should beat Schalke in the semis of the Champions League, there's no doubt in my mind that we'd lose badly to either Barcelona or Real Madrid should we progress to the finals. They are currently playing on an entirely different planet.

It's hard to be positive after today's tragic failure. Stupid things were said by our players before the game and it came back to bite them hard in the game. Scholes, in particular, seemed to take it exceptionally bad, evidenced by his reckless challenge on Zabaleta after we had gone one down. His red card seemed alittle harsh, but I don't think any United fan can have any complaints, after seeing Zabaleta's bleeding leg.

The goal by Shitty was a terrible mistake by Carrick. Notice that Carrick only plays well against Chelsea. Every other time, he's about as useless as Hargreaves. And possibly every 5 or so games, he does something incredibly stupid. Sadly he's signed a new contract and Ferguson, being the stubborn mule he is, will stick with him next season.

Speaking of Ferguson, tactically I thought not starting Hernandez was a fatal mistake. With Rooney out, Hernandez was the striker in fine form. Instead he started Berbatov. Although Berbatov really didn't do much wrong, except miss two sitters that Hernandez would have pounced on and given us the lead in the first half.

The team on the whole did as well as they possibly could. You could see the tired legs by the end of the game. Only the 3 substitutes and Park were scampering around the pitch, chasing and harrassing. If we had scored the equaliser, we'd probably would have lost it in extra time. Of course the counter-arguement is that Shitty is really a terrible team and had it not been for a gift by Carrick, they would never have scored anyway.

Let's put this behind us and go seal up the league title, beginning this Tuesday at St James.