God Awful Ref Robs United

Manchester United 0 - Portsmouth 1
Scorers
Portsmouth : Muntari (pen 77)

Team : Van der Sar (Kuszczak 46), Evra, Vidic, Rio, Brown, Scholes, Hargreaves (Carrick 68), Nani, Ronaldo, Rooney, Tevez (Anderson 68)

So many talking points to this game and I don't even know where to start.

Let me first begin with how goddamn awful blogger.com is. If you're thinking of starting a blog, I wouldn't recommend using this platform. I couldn't log in the entire day. Hell, I couldn't even view this page until now. It's frustrating as hell, especially during Sunday soccer with the guys where everyone was wondering when the review was coming.

As it was an early Saturday kickoff, Kentona and I did the usual 'keep our partners occupied while we get our fix' routine by prawn fishing at our usual haunt.

The game started off well for us. In fact it started off very well for us. In the opening minutes, Ronaldo brightly raced into the penalty area only to be crudely barged off the ball by Distin and to everyone's amazement the referee, Martin Atkinson, for the day waved play on. Only a couple of seconds earlier, a similar body-check on the same player was deemed a foul. Having set that precedent, Kentona and I could only stare wide-eyed in astonishment at the big screen TV in front of us. That was some bloody in-consistant refereeing.

But judging the way we played, we were sure it wouldn't matter in the final reckoning. We were all over Pompey. It was only a matter of time before we would erupt.

Yet as time went by, we kept missing chance after chance. If there was one criticism of our play was that we were all hat but no cattle.

In the second half, Van der Sar was replaced by Kuszczak, which could only mean that Van der Sar must have been carrying an injury. Again at that point in time, it didn't matter. United kept up the pressure from the first half and it was just a matter of time before we murdered them.

Then in the 68th minute, it all began to fall apart, in probably the most spectacular fashion. Without a striker on the bench, Fergie brought on Carrick and Anderson in place of Hargreaves and Tevez. The substitutions had me going....WTF???

If there was a dying need to bring someone out, it would have been Scholes. I can't recall him doing fuck all the entire game. Moreover I couldn't believe he took out Hargreaves. The moment Hargreaves was taken out, I was thinking of ways how Portsmouth could nick it from a quick release from a corner.

The rationale is simple. When we get corners, both Vidic and Rio would both move forward for headers, leaving both the full-backs to play the role of central defenders. Given that Brown also joins the two in front, Hargreaves is usually the other guy who plays the role of the defender. That's just the way we play from observation.

As for taking Tevez out, IMO, I thought if Fergie was going to sacrifice a frontman, it should have been Rooney. He's been in somewhat of a scoring funk lately. In fact, he's more prone to missing chances presented to him than to clinically finish them off.

In the 76th minute, the unthinkable happened. We were caught flat-footed when David James caught the ball from our corner kick and released it early down the flanks. Without Hargreaves in a defensive position and Evra and Scholes going awol, the defensive onus fell on Anderson and Rooney (????).

Unfortunately, Rooney can't defend if his life depended on it. Instead of following his man, Baros, he got sucked into following the ball leaving Baros totally unmarked. Kranjcar found Baros with a pretty easy pass, leaving him one on one with Kuszczak.

Baros rounded Kuszczak, and in the process ran into him. The referee gave a penalty and sent Kuszczak off. While I probably agree with the penalty decision, I thought the sending off decision was a god awful one. If I hadn't known better I would have thought that the pathetic Atkinson had a punt on Pompey.

Without a keeper, Rio took on the keeper's role and Muntari scored from the spot. A man and a goal down, it was going to be an incredibly tall task for the men in red.

The game ended 1-0 to Portsmouth, no thanks to some seriously dodgy refereeing.

While as United fans, and fans in general, we probably blame the referee, but we also need to look at ourselves. We created a boatful of chances and couldn't put one away.

Moreover, there were some weird decisions that baffle logic. In the past week, the coaching staff have been under-performing. If a casual fan like myself can see it, I don't understand how professionals can goof it up so badly.

At least there's a silverlining here, Chelsea got dumped by Barnsley.

United Thru To The Quarters

Manchester United 1- Lyon 0
Scorers
Manchester United : Ronaldo (40)

Team : Van der Sar, Evra, Vidic, Rio, Brown, Fletcher, Carrick, Nani, Anderson (Tevez 70), Ronaldo (Hargreaves 90), Rooney

We're never going to win the Champions League. There, I said it.

Despite having, perhaps, the best squad to compete for the holy grail, we're going to be let down by a brain dead coaching staff. For some inexplicable reason we went to a 4-5-1 formation while playing at home. Suffice to say, we were simply wretched. Had Lyon played anywhere near the potential they were able to, we would have been duely punished.

Well, at least there is a silverlining here. Whichever team we face in the quarters is going to be infinitely better than the French. I would love to see the bewildered looks on both Fergie and Queiroz when we underachieve in Europe yet again.

There's nothing very much to say about the game itself. Putting out a 4-5-1 simply sucked the entertainment out of the game. Ronaldo scored a scrappy goal at the end of the first half to give us the lead. Given how we played, I'm not even sure we deserved a goal.

After holding out a very inept Lyon frontline, we switched to a 4-4-2, by introducing Tevez in place of Anderson. Immediately the game opened up. We began to exploit the space in front of us but our finishing let us down, leaving a nervous end to the game.

The difference was huge between the 2 formations. If Fergie and company cannot see it, then they must be blind. I can barely understand playing a 4-5-1 in an away fixture, but to play it in a home leg is simply unacceptable. This is the leg we are supposed to put our opponents away.

Without sounding like a broken record, I'm just going to part with this saying 'Those who fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it.'

United Cuts Lead To One Point

Fulham 0 - Manchester United 3
Scorers
Manchester United : Hargreaves (15), Park (44), Davies (og 72)

Team : Van der Sar, Evra, O'Shea, Rio, Brown, Scholes, Hargreaves, Nani (Anderson 75), Park, Saha (Ronaldo 69), Tevez (Rooney)

I'll keep this one short (no...really I will).

A combination of a bad stomachache and the fact that all the coffee shops around my area were showing the Arsenal-Villa game, resulted in Kentona and I making the short trip to Queens Country Club to catch the game mid-way thru. As a result, I completely missed Hargreaves' opener. So any help describing or providing a video would be welcomed. (Jiahao, I'm banking on you to produce the goods!)

I did, however, catch the second goal. I was a well worked goal with Saha, Nani, Scholes all involved before the ball was floated into the penalty area for Park to head. We weren't doing very much due to the huge gulf in class between the teams. In other words, it was relatively easy.

We even had the luxury of giving Fulham a huge amount of possession which probably wasn't a very smart thing to do. But like I mentioned, the gulf between the two teams is huge, and in the grander scheme of things, didn't really change the scoreline.

We even managed a third, when O'Shea forced an own goal from Simon Davies. We were simply the better team, even at half pace.

The good thing about Queens is that it usually shows two matches and I was busy turning around to catch glimpses of the Arsenal game. It, of course, helped that there was a really beautiful lady sitting in that general direction....ahm....

It's rather frustrating that Arsenal managed to equalize at the last second to pull one point ahead of us in the standing. I suppose from their point of view, it was more of two points lost than one gained. It can't be denied that Arsenal are crumbling fast before our very eyes and with 10 games to go, I'm really feeling good about our chances.