Still Following the Trawler

number 1 Let’s get one thing straight: this was a tricky and challenging encounter. Wolfsburg, the German champions, were undoubtedly up for this; realising a win would take them top of group B. To make matters harder for us, we travelled to Germany minus 12 first team players (the vast majority defenders), knowing that we would have to subsidise this loss by playing a hugely unfamiliar and inexperience back line consisting of only one defender. Well, as it was, Dzeko’s 56th minute header was their only meaningful threat towards our defenders, however ‘meaningful’ ultimately became ‘meaningless’ as the goal was heavily ruled out by our overall class and superiority. Our crocked reserves – with Park at right-back and Fletcher and Carrick at centre-half – performed formidably, however the award for most impressive performance of the day was of course reserved for a certain out-of-sorts Scouser. number 2 Mickey Owen’s hat-trick was not only fantastically well taken; however his 7th of the...

Carrick celebrating with Berbatov after scoring United's winning second goal. Superb one-touch link up play between Berbatov and Giggs was gracefully rewarded by a stunning shot from just inside the area from Carrick. Although not overly-fluid throughout the game, our passing was positive over all, and Berbatov showed superb vision when he came on to ignite the attack. Good : Berbatov...in the first half. His early introduction changed the shape of the game. I feel he is subtly (in truly typical Berbatov fashion!) becoming one of our most important players. I've heard people say that him and Rooney find it difficult playing together because they are both fighting for the same position and trying to dominant that role through the middle, however Berbatov showed yesterday, with surprisingly high levels of energy and movement off the ball, that he is able to create and dictate play so the whole team can function fluidly on the attack. He either created or contributed to every atta...