Home thoughts from abroad

GREETINGS from a delightfully sunny Madrid, where your correspondent is preparing to relish the Galacticos trying to overturn a four-goal deficit against some third division minnows in the Cup.

All Reds are off on their jollies this week, after all: we have players heading for Qatar much to Fergie’s displeasure; others like Giggs and Neville sloping off to Dubai; and fans staggering towards Dublin for part one of the play-off showdown. So I figured I’d join in – so much the better to help erase the memory of Sunday’s bitter disappointment. You may recall I was dreading the game, and I emitted a Homeric “d’oh!” when I heard the result of the match I had really wanted to see that night: Lyon 5, Marseilles 5.

Tellingly, ex-Chelsea “legend” Didier Deschamps said afterwards that if his Marseilles team were going to have to score six goals every match to get the three points, “that’s going to get complicated.” Tsk: typical prosaic Chelsea-esque mentality. A United soul would simply respond “we’ll just make sure we score more!” !Better that attitude than the regressive, niggling 4-5-1 used at Chelsea, which unsurprisingly meant that all our good teamwork had no attacking edge.

Still, we are proud of the effort and performance, given the task for our regular centre backs and the fact that Chelsea have admittedly been on fire.

Of course the ref cocked up for the goal; but didn’t he also blunder in not punishing Johnny Evans for his savaging of Drogba? This litany of complaint we are now getting after every single match is becoming tiresome, embarrassing and almost certainly self-defeating. After all, it wasn’t the referee who picked just one United striker, thus almost ensuring we wouldn’t score enough, was it?

Naturally, there’s been plenty of renewed discussion about getting more firepower into the squad, especially in light of the sobering Arsenal tally of 55 goals already scored this season. But who’s available and affordable? Not many. (Mind you, I did catch sight of an excellent prospect driving home a superb curler on Saturday .... name of Saha. Oh.) Perhaps we will need to look to our midfielders to supply more. Unfortunately, two of them have already proved to be wholly unreliable on this front (Carrick and Anderson) whilst the new boy Obertan is yet to convince. I must challenge the verdict offered last week by one observer (“he’s the new Luke Chadwick”) however: surely he is the new David Bellion? Remember him? The quickest thing seen at Old Trafford since that black cat that used to emerge from the Stretford End, and with approximately the same level of ball control. Mind you, Bellion did go on to thrive at Bordeaux, so let us be patient with the boy.

After all, we once hounded Diego Forlan out of England for being useless in front of goal and now look at him: two Golden Boots and a host of clubs willing to pay up to €30million for him. In any event, I’m still not convinced we need to panic just yet. Owen has barely got started, Berbatov has been brilliant but under used, and both Macheda and Welbeck need to be given time. Fergie has just declared that he expects “things to settle down properly” once this latest round of disruptive internationals is over and I can see what he means. Our December fixture list is hardly intimidating and Chelsea have their African Nations Cup nightmare in January. Five points at this stage, is negligible. And besides: it isn’t Chelsea we should be worried about, surely? I have seen the future, and I fear it is Gooner-shaped.”