Waking up so they can continue dreaming...

So today one might expect the papers to be full of people eating humble pie. That is if one had never read a paper before yesterday.

I'm noticing a trend that it is always The Guardian which has the biggest problem with us. Let's look at three reports on the game last night from there.

Kevin McCarra starts his report making out our great performance was nothing really:

Utter domination can be a humdrum affair in football. Manchester United were spectacular intermittently and had to scuffle on occasion, yet they still brought down the curtain on this quarter-final in the first leg.

He continues, "United were sound enough", and of course, "Sloppiness from Roma was of help". And of course it helps that Italian sides are rubbish, "Italian football is suffering an identity crisis, disturbed that it is being stripped of a status that once looked permanent".

Daniel Taylor refuses to acknowledge his own stupidity of yesterday, claiming it was Sir ALex and Man Utd fans who didn't think Ronaldo could cut it away from home in Europe (The same Ronaldo who is now Champions League top scorer and has scored, by my reckoning, 43% of his goals away from home):

Ferguson had acknowledged before this match that it was legitimate to say Ronaldo had struggled to find his best form on United's foreign trips. United's fans have wondered for a long time when Ronaldo would start having a telling impact away from Old Trafford and now, finally, they have their answer. His goal had nothing to do with running past a defender, or manipulating the ball with a clever way of striking it. It was just a goal of courage, a running leap to meet Paul Scholes's cross and a thumping header that will have reminded United fans of a certain age of Tommy Taylor.

And even now it wasn't about skill, just courage.

Paul Doyle starts his piece with a bizarre bit (which must have been written before the game, otherwise the man obviously is completely insane) designed simply to say that Liverpool are brilliant:

Hosting Real and United in the knock-out stages of Europe's most prestigious club competition should be a daunting prospect - but usually it isn't. Of the sides who regularly reach the knock-out stages, Real and United have the worst away records, Real losing a ridiculous 71.4% of their away knock-outs since 2000 and United a similarly pitiful 63.6%. Compare that to the 21st century's best travellers, AC Milan, who've lost just 16.6% of their away knock-out clashes (the next best, in case you're interested, is Liverpool, who've lost 33.1% of away knock-outs - and won 44.4%, the best proportion in the continent).

What a way to start a match report on a Man Utd game. The praise, when it comes, is so grudging to be vaguely distasteful:

Tonight, finally, Ferguson and Queiroz can, at least temporarily, claim vindication

Oliver Kay in The Times suggests, rather optimistically that Ronaldo may have done enough:

Ronaldo’s remaining detractors were surely silenced by his 36th goal of a remarkable season, a brave header six minutes before half-time. Ronaldo had been subjected to some strong challenges, Christian Panucci catching him with a stray elbow in the first half, but once again he enjoyed the last word, putting United ahead when he rose to head home from Paul Scholes’s cross.

I'm quite sure that come our next away game in the Champions League they will be saying exactly the same thing - in fact here's the line for them all to use, "Was Ronaldo's performance against Roma a one off or will he finally go on to prove that he can cut it on the big stage?" - They can use that for the final as well.

Once again it is down to Martin Samuel to tell it like it is, I quote from his piece at length:

Never does it in the big matches, does he? Never does it when the pressure is on against the best teams. Never scores the ones that matter.

So, how to explain this and satisfy those who still doubt? Noted small-game player Cristiano Ronaldo set Manchester United on the way to an entirely meaningless Champions League semi-final with a not-at-all brave header against the completely useless second-best team in Italy in the benign atmosphere of the dilapidated cowshed that is the Olympic Stadium. There, that should please them.

The reality is different, however. Wayne Rooney’s second-half goal may have settled the game, and surely the tie barring a catastrophe in the second leg at Old Trafford, but it was Ronaldo who was the hero of the night, the man whose courage and willingness to put his head where most jinky wingers would not put a foot sets him apart from all contemporaries, certainly this season.

Players with Ronaldo’s skill are not meant to score headers. Certainly, they are not meant to score the type of header most commonly associated with the towering lumps of gristle who play at centre half. That is what he did last night. Ronaldo scored the sort of headed goal that John Terry used to get for Chelsea, before he was marked to anonymity at corners; the type that makes everybody in the arena flinch, that ruins smiles and distorts cheekbones.

Ronaldo’s determination to get on the end of the ball in the 39th minute came close to demonstrating a streak of madness. At the very least it presented a serious challenge to his status as a poster boy: not unless he fancies a career endorsing dental cement.

That is what makes him special and what made his 36th goal of a remarkable season special, too. When Rooney over-hit a pass to Paul Scholes that was chased down and lobbed back into the penalty area, there was something almost demonically possessed about the way Ronaldo hared into the space and launched himself at the floating ball. A player needs to keep his eyes open to direct a header in that instance, he needs to be prepared for any foreign object to meet his face — head, elbow, boot, shoulder, the fist of an advancing goalkeeper.

The best round-up of post-match quotes comes, unfortunately, from The Guardian:

"We have a great chance of going through now. We deserved to win this game because it was a really good performance. Everyone knows what a hard place this is to visit but we had a few other chances as well. The team played fantastically well and we feel we can win this competition."

The other story today is Avram Grant's response to Sir Alex's comments on the fixture controversy:

Ferguson's comments appeared to unnerve the Chelsea manager. Grant consistently referred to this evening's clash with the Turkish champions as 'the last 16' and mistook a bouquet of flowers given to him by some Galatasarary supporters when the team arrived here for a hospitable welcome from Fenerbahce's passionate fans.