TERRACE TALK: Reaction from the weekend's top Premiership action
It’s getting serious now, isn’t it?
You can’t escape the feeling that everyone at the top is watching everything like a hawk, waiting for any small slip. It’s great to be involved, anyway.
I assume we won’t be making snide remarks about referees’ birthplaces this week. Small-town boy Anthony Taylor gave us a slightly generous penalty, which we’ve earned after six years of cruelty at this miserable hellhole.
Brendan coughed up his fine for the Masonic nonsense, but kept waffling on. He uses words for sound rather than meaning. As an ex Chelsea man who owes them plenty I’m sure he never meant to denigrate them by saying Moses is struggling to deal with a massive club’s expectancy.
Nooooo, they don’t have any expectancy in dat der London. The problem with so-called mind games came when everyone began looking for a motive in top managers’ every burp and fart. Some fans remain convinced we’ll never see Mason at our games again thanks to some astute Rodgers scheme.
Dream on. Besides, we’re not Evertonians. Webb’s behaviour in the Chelsea game hinted that referees aren’t beyond a little cod-psychology of their own, so maybe it’s best to hunker down and focus on what you can influence? The month trundles on without any further signs of signings. Barcelona’s wonder boy winger ceased to be a talking point; it’s all rather Orwellian how these things dominate cyberspace then vanish in a puff of smoke.
Here’s hoping Gerrard, Sakho and Sturridge aren’t being rushed back for any of that “hey, it’s just like having brand new players” garbage. This league is becoming tight now and the minnows aren’t putting up much of a fight, which in turn means the Champions League qualifying total is growing every year. We could do with a couple of reinforcements, as we might lose a lot more than money in the long run.
We had a dreadful record at Stoke. There were hopes they would slither away after trying to escape the Pulis cocoon of route-one pragmatism, the way Wimbledon and Bolton dropped like a stone between two stools.
Fat chance; they beat Chelsea, almost beat Everton, stood their ground against City and gave us the fight of our lives again. That stadium often does strange things and we’ve never really got the hang of it. Nobody has.
Maybe this is the way; just go for it and confuse the hell out of them. You usually need two things here; organisation and character. We totally lack one but we’ve unearthed the latter from somewhere, perhaps we’re bolstered by what we know we can do up front.
How much of this particular scare was self-inflicted? They were classy efforts from Crouch and Adam but how they got the opportunity in the first place still rankles despite the eventual outcome. We can’t go on like this, surely? Or maybe we can. I still predict that against the very best sides this sort of end-to-end “basketball for feet” will not work, but by God Rodgers is giving us some fun while he persists in trying.
Not much more can be said about Suarez surely but Sterling has shown real purpose of late and Sturridge, although he trotted onto the pitch a little too gingerly for my liking, eventually played like he’d never been away.
We can slice teams apart when we play like this, the trouble as always is how open we are at the back. You don’t win trophies like this. Thankfully Adam’s set pieces were uniformly awful. One bit of Ferguson kidology that did work, and we fell for it.
Gerrard was a curious mix of good defence and (for him) atrocious passing, while I’m past the point of no return with Johnson, the half-arsed liability. These loathsome luddites have had this coming for years though, so we should probably save the nit-picking for when it costs us points.
And breathe……
“Never a dull moment, eh?” chirped a colleague breezily at full-time on Saturday — and who’d been sounding distraught 50 minutes earlier. Quite.
This gripping season had transformed what would once have been a run-of-the-mill Swansea league match into some sort of Gary Cooper shoot-out, as potentially historic as a cup final.
The morning papers had been full of references to the dark days of the pre-Law and Best early 60s, when United lost four in a row during the first of successive flirtations with relegation.
Matt Busby never had to cope with the massed hordes of spoiled angry Twitterati, of course, nor with the kneejerkery of a certain kind of younger journalist who doesn’t have any sense of perspective: how David Moyes would have envied that.
The whisperers had been out in force all week too, especially since the Sunderland defeat, which some wrote up as though United had been eliminated and cast into some kind of inescapable abyss. The astonishing show of support from away-day Reds for Moyes and the team was often either ignored or dismissed: “one game left to save his job” was even the behind-scenes mutter being transmitted by some dark arts operators.
Equally headshaking was the widespread insistence that Fergie might somehow be to blame for Moyes’ travails because he was daring to show up at games. You can imagine what some of those very same journalists might have made of Fergie not showing up: “Alex Can’t Bear To Watch Disastrous Davey” or some such, no doubt.
As ever, the answers that matter are provided in the stadium, from players and supporters alike, and there should be no mistaking what Saturday’s response signified. Fans got stuck in, having earlier voted in various polls by fanzines to show their continued support for the new man, and the players — eventually — responded with a second- half display that was arguably our best 45 of the season at Old Trafford.
At the whistle, Reds up in the Stretford End crowded around the Moyes ‘Chosen One’ banner, thumping it demonstratively to draw attention to their loyalty, whilst Moyes impressively resisted what must have been a strong temptation to do a jig across the centre circle.
Yes, it was only Swansea. Yes, we’ve still hardly beaten anyone decent. Yes, we missed a hatful of chances. But is still felt like some line had been crossed when United emerged, rejigged and apparently reinspired, for that second half.
That is not to ignore the fact that the first half was one of the worst Moyes United has produced, fatally undermined by the bafflingly Fergesque decision to play Kagawa wide and Adnan central, thus denying both their best positions. The lack of confidence collectively exhibited was shocking, and even the tin-hat brigade to whom I have pledged allegiance were beginning to wonder whether we should have packed a white flag, just in case.
However, half-time emergency repairs complete, we then purringly witnessed the full range of Adnan’s precocious talents being given ample demonstration space, with Kagawa even looking mildly happy for the first time in memory. And rarely have I seen the old maxim about goals changing games so clearly illustrated as it was after Welbeck’s opener; the sudden soar in confidence amongst the players dazzled like the sun emerging from eclipse.
We could do without Chelsea looming now, it has to be admitted. This side does have some decent attributes, but ‘balls of steel’ does not appear to be one of them at the moment; you would fear for them if they concede early against a good, well-organised side. And Chelsea are clearly all that, and more, led by a man with a point to prove to Old Trafford.
My brigade will need their tin-hats close to hand: we’ll be in for frequent heavy bombardments for some time to come, you suspect.
Can you hear that loud revving noise? Is it a Harley? Is it a Ferrari?
No — it’s the Jose Mourinho football machine finally getting into gear.
It looks like we are finally turning a corner and leaving the inconsistency that dogged the earlier part of the season behind.
Given how we were playing in the first quarter of the season, and how well Hull were doing, this could have been ‘one of those’ games.
Hull did everything right on Saturday: they harried us every time we were on the ball, they closed us down quickly forcing us into mistakes and worked hard at suppressing us.
But I never doubted we were going to win this one. The team look so disciplined with every player knowing what is expected of them over the 90 minutes.
Jose doesn’t encourage displays of individual inventiveness as such, instead you follow a plan. By doing so you invariably win.
This sort of discipline and unwavering faith in the manager takes time to nurture but it looks as if we are well on the way with this group of players.
We are by no means the finished product, given the well documented deficiencies in our squad but we are heading in the right direction. Hull could never keep up their tactics of the first-half and, after the restart, abandoned that plan and began to foul time and again. We happily punish undisciplined sides even if Clattenburg chose not to.
The next four games will give us a good indicator of exactly how far we’ve come. Both the Manchester sides, West Ham fighting for its life and Stoke in the Cup fill the horizon.
Despite the games coming thick and fast I hope that Mourinho plays Torres for all of them as we don’t look half the team with E’to or Ba.
Not only is Torres working hard for the team but the goals are beginning to come. I think he still sometimes over-thinks his options in front of goal, but the instinctive aspect of his game is beginning to return, as we saw on Saturday.
Hopefully the old Torres will re-emerge from his unwanted hibernation he has had since joining Chelsea.
Speaking of comebacks, there is some talk of John Terry making a return for England. My feelings are mixed on this one. Anyone who wants England to do well in Brazil would welcome his return, however animosity towards Terry remains and he is regularly booed no matter what ground we go to.
My issue with Terry going back into the England team is that the press will have a field day. Past indiscretions will be dragged up and once again it will be open season not just on Terry but Chelsea.
But, first up for Chelsea — the Chosen One against the Special One. Much has been written about United’s demise — a dangerous thing to underestimate them in my view. Neither Moyes nor Manchester United have impressed this season, but one thing we have seen in this campaign is that anyone is capable of beating anyone so we need to have our game face on.
They still have dangerous players that have been our undoing in the past, but I’m hoping that Jose, as a superior manager, (and make no mistake, he is a superior manager) will have the measure of them.
Time to put that Chelsea machine in top gear and leave the others in our dust.
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