Manchester becoming a one-way street

Going into a game against their high-flying neighbours, it was hardly wise of David Moyes to starting batting around stats, particularly ones as weak as those which, he claimed, showed his team had matched Liverpool in the possession and passing stakes last Sunday week.

Rather more germane, it hardly needed stating, was the 3-0 winning scoreline for the Merseysiders in that game, just as the whopping 12-point gap between City and United – with the erstwhile noisy neighbours having played two games less – was the only stat that mattered before kick-off.

At the final whistle the score was again 3-0, the gap now 15 and United falling to their 10th defeat of the season. And even then, the stats could never fully do justice to the way this one-sided contest so harshly illuminated the yawning gulf now separating the blue and red sides of Manchester.

Such has been the almost universal concentration on Moyes’ misery this season that it took Gary Neville to remind viewers that there was much more at stake for Man City than Man United in this game – “City can win the title, United can’t.”

But United could do their bit to stop City winning the title – gagging rights rather than bragging rights, if you like. For that though, they needed everything to be alright on the night.

And from the first blast of the whistle it was anything but, City’s all-out attack rocking the home side back on its heels and allowing Edin Dzeko to open the scoring inside a minute. If, to their credit, it wasn’t quite all damage limitation after that for a United side which responded to the early blow with some spirit, the bulk of the action at Old Trafford still spoke of a huge disparity in quality, with United – for all Wayne Rooney’s class and endeavour – incapable of anything to match the will o’ the wispery of David Silva, the unhurried authority of Yaya Toure or the tenacious industry of Fernandinho, to name just three of City’s more outstanding performers.

David Moyes had been entitled to draw modest encouragement from recent successes. The stirring 3-0 comeback win over Olympiakos in the Champions League not only gave the long-suffering Stretford End a restorative night to remember but effectively kept the club’s season alive – if only until Bayern Munich come a-calling. And on the domestic front, the ensuing 2-0 defeat of West Ham should, in the shape of Wayne Rooney’s strike, at least ensure United are contesting the ‘Goal Of The Year’ gong when all the other honours are going elsewhere.

Bizarrely, it seemed to me, the win at Upton Park breathed new life into the theory that United are set up to function more effectively without the injured Robin van Persie, this despite the fact that he trails the side’s top scorer Rooney by just two goals – 13 to 11 – and had suffered his latest setback having just grabbed the hat-trick which sent the team through to the Champions League quarter-finals.

Nevertheless, the theory proposed that, in the absence of the Dutchman, United presented a more potent attacking threat with Rooney up top and Juan Mata – cup-tied for the Champions League – behind him in the number 10 role.

Last night at Old Trafford was an opportunity to see the theory in action against rather more formidable opponents than the Hammers, and the outcome should have left no-one in any doubt that no tactical tweaking is worth the sacrifice of a goal-scorer.

To put it another way, consider what van Persie would have done with the dropping ball which Marouane Fellaini, with time and space on his side, almost spooned into the grateful arms of Joe Hart last night. And that, at a point in the first half when City’s one-goal lead was hardly looking unassailable.

But, in the second half, the visitors more than made the most of that reprieve, confirming their superiority with a second goal for Dzeko and then, with a certain inevitability once he’d been given licence to get forward, that icing on the cake from Toure.

Men against boys, you’d almost say.