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.