Advertisement

Champions League Review - what is the point of Manchester United?

Louis van Gaal’s football is a risible disgrace.

Defensively solid and with control of the ball in midfield, no risks taken. Fine, if you’re Sam Allardyce at Sunderland looking to grind your way to the promised land of Premier League survival. But a manager who has spent a quarter of a billion pounds on a squad in two years should be capable of producing football which doesn’t increase the share price at Dignitas.

The formation from the start was baffling, with the tediously pointless Wayne Rooney brought back into a side that then dropped Juan Mata to the bench as a result. It’s true that Mata is hardly any faster than Rooney, but at least he is capable of translating what is received by his retina, along his optic nerves and to his brain. He can also control the ball, pass, and think. Sometimes he does all four of these activities at the same time.

And Van Gaal had them lined up preposterously deeply. PSV are not an impressive side, and yet Rooney drifts back, and Morgan Schneiderlin drops further still. It is deliberately insipid football. When you add substitutions, like Marouane Fellaini into midfield rather than up front - for half an hour - and Mata in play for six minutes, it’s perverse and unjustifiable. From the fans’ point of view they are clearly sick of it. They behaved under Moyes at the ground for most of his tenure, but now they have lost patience with the farce in front of them, and are rightly booing the doggerel. Van Gaal can afford to alienate the fans at the ground, there will always be tourists ready to replace them, but with the ineffective dross he is serving up, Champions League group stage qualification is at risk. If he loses his job because his cowardice costs both the fans and owners, a sacking is fully deserved.

Manchester City descend into a cold funk

There is at least something to respect about a hot funk. When someone gets so riled up you can see the steam coming out of their ears, or when they are so cross they shake both their fists comically in frustration, or when they come out with a devastating put down that seems to have been created in heaven, fair enough. We all know they will have to apologise and simmer down in the end, but the thrilling, sweaty, potentially dangerous nature of it is remarkable, memorable and enjoyable.

So it was with, say, Eric Cantona’s decision to assault Crystal Palace supporting xenophobe. Or when Carlos Tevez decided that, no, actually, he wasn’t going to do the very least that was expected of him by Roberto Mancini. Those were great, funky moments for Manchester clubs. Tonight it wasn’t. United were boring guff, and City were gutless guff. They had nothing in defence, no focus or controlled aggression. Instead Nicolas Otamendi willingly collapsed when people threw him a jolly mean glance. Fernando, Fernandinho and Yaya Toure stood and admired Paul Pogba and Claudio Marchisio. City made it easy for Juventus, throwing away the few chances they had.

It now looks as if the start to the season was an aberration for City. They still don’t care about the team or their manager, and they still don’t want to do something great in return for great wages. Time for the managers and players to change.

Barcelona are excellent at football but unloveable

Luis Suarez has done and said several things which mean that he is often regarded, with some justification, as an unpleasant man. He has a victim complex, which is often linked to narcissism. Lionel Messi and Neymar could soon join him as similarly flawed people, with both of them facing charges that they have diddled the state out of many millions of people. Given they are treated as heroes and ultimately depend on the public for their wealth and veneration, it is a shame that potentially neither of them feel any obligation to contribute to their well-being.

With those essential and necessary caveats out of the way, it can be said that their football for Barcelona has been extraordinary, of a kind that has rarely been seen before, performed on a regular basis that has not been seen by people of our generation before. The inventiveness, technique, swagger and confidence is remarkable, almost as remarkable as the football it produces. Last night, Roma were on the end of it, getting humped 6-1. Roma aren’t a bad side, but as Real Madrid showed at the weekend, even having excellent players of your own is no protection against Barcelona right now.

What is most interesting last night, given the excellent football is now expected, is that Suarez and Messi proffered up a penalty to Neymar, to give him the chance to get in on the action. Messi has just come from two months out, and seen Neymar and Suarez destroy teams almost every week. He has been shown, with contract negotiations ahead, that so good are his two colleagues, that he is not quite the talisman he once was. Add to that last season’s dip, the bollocking he received from a team-mate to sort himself out, and previous reports of Messi’s generous ego and imperfect attitude, and you can see that there are reasons to believe that Messi is now more part of a team, rather than the star of it.

There’s something cold and bloodless about those three, given their faults and given the rush to praise them regardless, but there is no denying that they might become even better as the season progresses. It is hard to imagine any team, even one as capable as Bayern Munich, as having the defence to withstand their talents.

Arsenal continue to do what they’ve always done

They beat Dinamo Zagreb with ease, as they should. They overcame a significant injury list to prosper, as any properly resilient side should expect to. After all, they still had Mesut Ozil, Olivier Giroud and Alexis Sanchez, and as their fans never tire of telling us: as good as Ozil and Sanchez are, Giroud is perhaps only beaten by Messi as the single greatest player in the history of the sport.

They find themselves favourites to qualify, with their last match in the group a trip to Olympiacos. Their injury list should have shortened by then (though who would be surprised if it had tripled in the meantime?) and another failure in this group would put any other manager at risk of unemployment. Arsenal have done well to get to a point where they can escape from early complacency. It is time for them to stop wasting their talent.