(In today's paper round up I may well criticise Ronaldo more than he actually deserves, this is for effect and to counterbalance the overwhelming one-sidedness of all the reports on last night's match. I don't really mean it...)So, we lost a game of football. We didn't play well and we lost a game of football. Halfway through reading the match reports, open in many tabs, I gave up, I was reading the same report over and over again and it seemed a little pointless to continue. How many times can you read the sentences "Ronaldo? They're missing him, huh? Long season." before your mind turns to jelly?
The central argument seems to be that we miss Ronaldo against the "lesser teams." This argument is the same argument they've gone on about all summer. Is this not the stupidest laziest argument possible? Simple question, how many games did Burnley lose in the Championship last season? 12. How many of those teams featured Ronaldo. None. You don't need Ronaldo to beat Burnley. Possibly if you add Ronaldo to Altrincham's team, they'd probably have a better chance of beating Burnley. A Premier League team doesn't need Ronaldo to beat Burnley. Ask Stoke. And this is nothing against Burnley, or other smaller teams or Championship teams. It's just a simple fact. We should beat these teams.
To me it's a lot simpler. We missed Nani and Valencia. It's more mundane and doesn't really give journalists the chance to wax lyrical on our demise, but when Valencia came on and starting getting to the line and putting balls in or running at people into the box we caused them problems. In the first 60 minutes we weren't doing that because we didn't have the wingers on the pitch to do it. Nani and Valencia may not be Ronaldo, but they are good enough to beat Burnley.
What would Ronaldo have done differently? We had Rooney who had a few speculative efforts from distance sail over the bar in classic Ronaldo fashion so we didn't need him there. He'd pretty much given up playing on the wing so he would have been no good getting quality balls into the box. Yes, he'd have almost certainly scored the penalty. But it's a penalty. You don't need a Ronaldo to score a penalty.
And if the penalty had gone in we would have almost certainly won. It wasn't the best penalty, but it wasn't the worst. Guess you have to question why Carrick took it when Rooney and Owen were on the pitch, but still, whoever took it should have scored. Anyone can take a bad penalty, anyone can face a goalie on form (and Jensen was man of the match), a goalie making saves he normally wouldn't.
So I'm not going to quote from very many reports. Daniel Taylor is fairly typical when he says:
Mark Ogden makes the point I made above but throws in Ronaldo as a little extra just to toe the party line:
Respect to The Manchester Evening News for not mentioning Ronaldo at all in their report.
(At this point, rubbing my eyes in despair at reading all this rubbish, my contact lens fell out. I took that as a sign I should move onto the quotes... All the other reports are as rubbish and can be criticised in the same way as mentioned above... Image from here)
Onto the quotes, Sir Alex gives credit where it's due - to Burnley:
The central argument seems to be that we miss Ronaldo against the "lesser teams." This argument is the same argument they've gone on about all summer. Is this not the stupidest laziest argument possible? Simple question, how many games did Burnley lose in the Championship last season? 12. How many of those teams featured Ronaldo. None. You don't need Ronaldo to beat Burnley. Possibly if you add Ronaldo to Altrincham's team, they'd probably have a better chance of beating Burnley. A Premier League team doesn't need Ronaldo to beat Burnley. Ask Stoke. And this is nothing against Burnley, or other smaller teams or Championship teams. It's just a simple fact. We should beat these teams.
To me it's a lot simpler. We missed Nani and Valencia. It's more mundane and doesn't really give journalists the chance to wax lyrical on our demise, but when Valencia came on and starting getting to the line and putting balls in or running at people into the box we caused them problems. In the first 60 minutes we weren't doing that because we didn't have the wingers on the pitch to do it. Nani and Valencia may not be Ronaldo, but they are good enough to beat Burnley.
What would Ronaldo have done differently? We had Rooney who had a few speculative efforts from distance sail over the bar in classic Ronaldo fashion so we didn't need him there. He'd pretty much given up playing on the wing so he would have been no good getting quality balls into the box. Yes, he'd have almost certainly scored the penalty. But it's a penalty. You don't need a Ronaldo to score a penalty.
And if the penalty had gone in we would have almost certainly won. It wasn't the best penalty, but it wasn't the worst. Guess you have to question why Carrick took it when Rooney and Owen were on the pitch, but still, whoever took it should have scored. Anyone can take a bad penalty, anyone can face a goalie on form (and Jensen was man of the match), a goalie making saves he normally wouldn't.
So I'm not going to quote from very many reports. Daniel Taylor is fairly typical when he says:
it would be unfair to dwell too much on United's shortcomings if it deflects any of the praise away from Burnley."It would be unfair," but every paper's going to do it anyway, because it gives so much more satisfaction to slag us off than it does to praise Burnley.
Mark Ogden makes the point I made above but throws in Ronaldo as a little extra just to toe the party line:
Ferguson’s starting XI certainly encouraged Burnley to be adventurous. With Ji-sung Park and Anderson deployed on both flanks, United lacked the attacking instinct of Nani and Antonio Valencia. How they could have done with Ronaldo.Sam Wallace in The Independent ticks the "dull Berba bashing" box as well as the "hysterical missing Ronaldo" box, in a way too dull to quote.
Respect to The Manchester Evening News for not mentioning Ronaldo at all in their report.
(At this point, rubbing my eyes in despair at reading all this rubbish, my contact lens fell out. I took that as a sign I should move onto the quotes... All the other reports are as rubbish and can be criticised in the same way as mentioned above... Image from here)
Onto the quotes, Sir Alex gives credit where it's due - to Burnley:
“It was a bad performance. We should have done more with the chances we had and the possession we had.
“In fairness to them they had a good spell and caused us a lot of problems.
“You wonder if it’s fate, Burnley back in the Premier League. It’s been a long time. You can’t deny them their victory. They worked hard, they worked their socks off. The fans were fantastic.”
Sir Alex honest on our performance:
"I'm sure we'll get a response [at Wigan] on Saturday, but we're all disappointed because it was a bad result," Ferguson said. "It was a terrific pitch so that's no excuse. We just should have done better with it. We didn't play well but that can happen. We usually take time to get going every season – sometimes it's October before we get to our best form – but, yes, we shouldn't be losing these games." ...
"I think we'd have won the game if we'd scored that [the penalty]," he said. "We'd have composed ourselves and won
And final word goes to Owen Coyle:
"Sir Alex dealt with defeat in the gracious manner I would expect of someone like that," said Coyle. "He is the best manager in world football and I still expect Manchester United to be champions."
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