The Good, The Bad And The Ugly …
Ugly terrace scenes and a putative match boycott have deflected attention from a rare United Champions League win on foreign soil.
One moment of genuine inspiration separated Sir Alex’s men from their hosts. Giggs’ quick-thinking helped United to a result which fans must have doubted given the team’s first half display.
Sir Alex can take some positives out of the game - his team showed composure and discipline and did not concede a goal despite one heart-stopping moment- but this was not a vintage performance from United. The team is capable of so much more but again, when asked to play away from home in Europe, United’s display was less than the sum of its parts.
The manager will be forced to reflect on why his biggest guns leave their armoury at home on the most demanding occasions. Giggs found the evening a toil until his excellent free-kick delivered the win. Larsson, winding down the clock on his United career, looked useful but was not a major influence on the game.
Wayne Rooney’s toothlessness against foreign opposition has already been diagnosed. The manager’s decision to send out his team with a 4-4-2 formation, looked at last, like the strong medicine required for whatever ails the young forward. Rooney should have scored early in the second half after a wonderful slalom run through the Lille defence. That chance apart, Rooney, like his fellow forwards, hardly lived up to his reputation.
Cristiano Ronaldo’s performance is equally deserving of reproach. Despite the revival of the old chorus that Ronaldo is ‘over-hyped,’ the player does have greatness within him but will only fulfill that calling when he demonstrates his appetite for the big occasion in United’s colours too. Ronaldo’s dismal goal-scoring in European competition was in little danger of improvement against an organised Lille team which ‘trebled-up’ whenever he claimed possession for United.
The stifling of United’s main attacking menace this season was a major reason why United were unable to gain any fluency in their attacks. Ronaldo, not for the first time, dallied too long, allowing the Lille defenders to regroup.
However, the player and his team should be well-used to such tactics at this level of football and should have a counter–strategy in reserve. One obvious solution would be to deploy a ‘run-through’ midfielder, the box-to-box central force who could supplement the attack. Of course, Paul Scholes performs this task admirably in the Premiership, as demonstrated this season in the victories over Liverpool and Aston Villa and the drawn game at Newcastle. However, in European away fixtures, Scholes’ brief appears to be to sit deeper and offer more support to the defence.
The result is that United take the field with two defensive midfield players in Scholes and Carrick and leave the attacking thrusts to the trident of Rooney, Ronaldo and Larsson. The tactic might be well-advised against cunning teams with dynamic and creative midfields. Against Lille, a workmanlike but uninspired unit at best, it looked a defensive strategy borne out of a lack of confidence, another theme already remarked upon within these pages.
Sir Alex’s forwards got little change out of the Lille defence until the game began to open up in the second half and United’s midfield began to exert a measure of authority on the proceedings.
United should now approach the return match with the belief that they have already done the hard work of qualifying for the quarter final stage. There, United will find the sort of opposition likely to punish more severely the occasional lapses in defensive concentration witnessed at the Stade Felix-Bollaert.
Nevertheless, a team which wins without playing well is a team that could go far. AU
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