Spurs Break Old Trafford Jinx

Manchester United 2 - Tottenham 3
Scorers
Manchester United: Nani (51), Kagawa (53)
Tottenham: Vertonghen (2), Bale (32), Dempsey (52)

Team: Lindagaard, Rio (Hernandez 90), Evans, Rafael, Evra, Carrick, Scholes, Giggs (Rooney 46), Nani, Kagawa (Welbeck 79), Van Persie

Anyone even surprised at this result? I know I'm not. We were terrible. Absolutely putrid in the first half and deserved this loss even though we did give a good account of ourselves in the second half. Sadly the game is not played in 45 minute halves.

I'm sure the newspapers tomorrow would all be screaming at our porous and sometimes non-existent defense, but the problem for me lies squarely in the midfield area. We are so bad in the centre of the park that we just didn't give our much maligned defenders a chance. The cover just wasn't there and there were times our midfielders didn't seem like they cared.

Just look at the first goal by Vertonghen. Neither Nani nor Carrick were interested in tracking him when he got the ball. If either had tracked back, he wouldn't have the chance to slice right thru our defense to score. Similarly, Bale was given arces of space to run at Rio while Evans was busy covering Defoe. Even for Dempsey's tap in, no one shadowed him, allowing him all the space and time in the world to tap in Lindegaard's shotblock.

To make matters worse, our midfield is terribly static. Kagawa had no one to play with. Once Rooney came on in the second half, the entire complexion of the game changed. Suddenly all the off the ball running by Kagawa mattered. Suddenly he had someone to play the ball off, and as a result, we played so much better, pinning Spurs back into their own half. They could barely cope with the movement. Even Van Persie and Nani came to life, after stinking it up in the first half.

We brought the game to Spurs in the second half, but were unable to claw back a huge first half deficit. Until Ferguson starts playing the youngsters (Ando and Cleverley together) or we get a covering midfielder in the mold of a Yaya Toure or Tiote, we're going to see a whole lot of play like the first half. Sometimes we pull out of it, like against Fulham, Soton and Liverpool, but against good enough opponents, we're just going to fail like against Everton and today against Spurs.