First UEFA Champions league game, 1st win, any win in the champions league is a good result home or away. But as I am united perfectionist, I’m probably not the only reds fan that was not too happy with the game. Now don’t get me wrong if someone had said prior the kick off, that united win 1-0, I would have taken it….RELUCTANTLY…
The reason being ,that we are play in supposedly the best league, with the best players in the world, you only have to look at the champions league semi finals and finals for the last few years to see how many English teams are in there in the mix…
So why then when we play a team, that let’s be honest, (and this is no disrespect to Turkish football, but they would probably struggle to get into the play off’s in the championship) do we play a negative 4-5-1 formation from the start???
Who am I to argue with the greatest British manager of all time, but I just feel that it was a very negative formation against a team far inferior to ourselves…People might say it was not a 4-5-1 it was a 4-3-3,right that’s fine but again we all know formations only come into play when you are defending, so you would really only play a 4-3-3 when you are playing teams with flying fullbacks, e.g. Chelsea (Cole and Bosingwa),so that your front 3 players surpress their fullbacks from making galloping runs forward….But the Besiktas fullbacks didn’t make their way over the halfway line for most of the game, they posed no threat at all from out wide on the flanks.
So we have now nullified our attacking play, to compensate our defence, when it was needless to….
In the first half playing our 4-5-1 / 4-3-3 we didn’t look like scoring…..Wayne Rooney was far too isolated on his own…Nani was far too predictable in his play cutting back in on his right foot, for either shooting or crossing……Antonio Valencia played some good football, looked positive in his play, strong ,quick..But and I say But, is every time he got in great positions at the byline, his final ball never once got onto a united head, leg, foot, back, anything and the biggest attribute a winger can have, is creativity, and we are not seeing that yet…
Then in the 63rd minute SAF made the change that personally I think he should have started with. Two recognized strikers, a solid 4-4-2. If Sir Alex Ferguson is thinking of resting players for the Man City game, then surely it’s easier to win a game then bring players off, then it is too struggle and bring players on, that only have 30 minutes to get to grips with the pace of the game, then play two strikers in Berbatov and Owen that have played hardly any football together..
All said within the 30 minutes we had the 4-4-2, we created more opportunities then we did for the whole 63 minutes previous with Scholes wrapping the game up, it was the right result, Besiktas created nothing, my only concern is that come what may we might just fall short of our own expectations.
