European Oils

A few thoughts on our glorious victory last night and the paper's reaction to it.
1) On playing Rafael - most of the papers make a big deal about this, his inexperience being cited as reason why he shouldn't have been up against Ronaldinho. Firstly Sir Alex puts it pretty well:

Ferguson admitted that Rafael had "made mistakes" in the game but vigorously defended his decision to play the teenager. "We have invested a great deal in him and we are not going to stop [trusting him] just because it is Milan," he said. "He has to learn that against Ronaldinho this is the real world and he has to develop his game. He made some mistakes but he won't make them again next season."

Secondly, did anyone in our defence (or anyone's defensive play) come up to scratch:

Did the inexperience of Rafael and Evans play into Milan’s hands? It is hard to say so, because Rio Ferdinand, still feeling his way back to fitness, and Patrice Evra looked equally vulnerable. Evra made an erratic start, losing possession to Pato in the first minute, mistiming a challenge on the same player and, from the resulting free kick swung in by Beckham, sending an ill-advised overhead kick to Ronaldinho, whose volley took a deflection off Carrick and ended up in the net.

But also I personally felt that Rafael grew into the game, Ronaldinho's influence waned, partly I'd argue as a result of Rafael's work, although Ronaldinho is criticised in certain quarters for tiring second half - I think it's as much that we (and Rafael in particular) gave him less space/time on the ball, and we held the ball better ourselves after the opening 20 minutes or so.

2) Some of the papers argue we were outclassed in the first half especially, and Milan looked good, first half especially, at times, but we made them look good with sloppy passing and defending and allowing them space in the first half - towards the end of the half we started keeping the ball better and our forward play improved, resulting in the goal, yet our defence still looked lacking in concentration. 2nd half we looked the better team all over, bar the final ten or so minutes as we began to make life difficult for ourselves by panicking at Milan's second, a problem we saw in a couple of games earlier in the season - an uncharacteristic lack of composure in defending narrow leads as time runs out (the Arsenal game at Old Trafford springs to mind). Which brings us to the third point:

3) This headline - "Great entertainment, but neither flawed Milan nor United will win Champions League" is what I was going to complain about - but then reading what Gabrielle Marcotti actually wrote I stopped:

Bottom line, these are two very fragile teams right now. The difference is that I can see how United can improve, I can't really see how Milan can get much better

Admittedly he ruins it a bit by getting confused in his sentence construction and after beginning it by saying we could improve he ends it by saying we can't, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt tho...
Anyway, the point is a fair one - all our problems are problems that are solvable or came from individual bad performances on the night - we played worse than we can, Milan performed at their best. We can win it. And thus those headline writers should be less misleading.

4) And one thing the papers do get right - Rooney is pretty good, lets hope they remember this next time he gets sent off...