To Rooney’s critics I have three words: ‘told you so’

GREETINGS from Lyon where, as I write on a Tuesday morning, the Rhone is sparkling in warm spring sunshine, the first aperitif of the day is agreeably enlivening, and we are still chuckling over the spiking of the Gunners on Saturday.

Not that we should necessarily read too much into that, perhaps, given that if Arsenal were a horse, Wenger could arguably have been fined for running a non-trier. Within minutes of kick-off it was embarrassingly obvious from the first few bottled challenges that Arsenal would simply not be at the races, and that United would be producing the commitment required to answer the derby day defeat critics.

By the way, I wrote last week that “thankfully no-one has yet blamed any emotional impact of Munich’s 50th for the Man City failure” but, almost predictably, Fergie charged into that bear trap in his pre-match comments, compounding the grisliness by suggesting the Arsenal match would be “a test” akin to that faced by the 1958 players when they returned to action post-crash.

Of all the sad-sack excuses deployed this past few weeks – the poor pitch, post-international tiredness et al – this was the most distasteful.

Still, all that was forgotten by dinnertime, and it would be remiss of me not to single out two players, often sneered at here and elsewhere, for their surprisingly decent contributions: Fletcher and Carrick. The latter in particular produced a couple of sumptuous through balls of a class which even Crerand and Cantona would have been pleased with, although one notes his shooting remained as woeful as ever.

Meanwhile, Nani and Anderson’s brilliance should have come as no surprise to regular Old Trafford watchers, and I cannot get very worked up about the former’s supposedly disrespectful mickey-taking, not least given the petulant assaults perpetrated by those sulking children, Gallas and Eboue.

When opponents behave as disgracefully as that, they lose all right to be treated with respect: nutmegs, and indeed nuttings, are wholly warranted.

As for Rooney, who I have been hotly defending here recently during his so-called slump, I simply remark: “told you so”.

Rooney’s influence may have caused Fergie to comment that he is worried Wayne is becoming too talismanic – as in The Robson Syndrome – but so be it: no amount of managerial mind games is going to alter the fact that the Boy Wonder’s team-mates draw life from his ebullience as do flowers from water.

Certainly one expects Lyon’s defenders will be quaking at the prospect of facing him tonight, unused as they are to his kind of player in the mimsy predictability of Ligue 1. Fergie, as is his wont, has tried to make out that Lyon are a formidable hurdle for us, but in truth they should not be. He and I were lone Manchester spies at the Stade Gerland last week – separately, of course – and Olympique’s late-goaled 4-1 win did little to disguise the fact that they are not the team they once were, a point further illuminated by their defeat at Le Mans this past weekend, which prompted a watching Martin Ferguson to remark unguardedly in front of the French media as to their mediocrity.

Incidentally, Fergie comically argued at the weekend: “Lyon have got the League locked up so they have an advantage (in being able to rotate without cost)” when in fact OL are only one point ahead and wilting under an assault from Blanc and Bellion’s Bordeaux.

Looks like they didn’t have L’Equipe by Fergie’s South African pool last week, eh?

Olympique do, however, possess two superb players in the form of their lives in Benzema and the oft-overlooked Jeremy Toulalan. Moreover OL coach Bernard Lacombe has claimed he has found United’s Achilles heel in “a defence that can crumble when you exert a certain kind of pressure on it” whilst Joel Bats thinks he has sussed out Van Der Sar’s “exploitable weaknesses”.

Nonetheless, elimination to this lot would be a stunning blame-storm-inducing catastrophe, no matter how much Fergie tries to big them up.

Richard Kurt, whose “Red Army Years” is only available via [e-mail]