United Road Take Me Home

Turn the telly up!

We all make mistakes. Red Issue for instance previewed yesterday’s game with the warning that a cracker was unlikely to be on the cards. Meanwhile on Sky’s Sunday Supplement the Mirror’s Martin Lipton was asserting, with that unswerving conviction that journalists are prone to, that Tevez would play no part in the afternoon’s game. And I myself, may have suggested that signing Michael Owen was no Fergie masterstroke, but a desperate throw of the dice from a manager stripped of financial resources. Well, it gives me infinite pleasure to state that I was wrong. Well, mostly wrong.
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If Michael Owen does nothing else in a United shirt he did that yesterday. When the stakes were at their very highest, when pressure at its most intense, he got one chance and he slotted it away with imperious ease. City fans will crowd the airwaves with moans about Fergie-time (I’d not even made it to the top of Sir Matt Busby Way before hearing some bitter invoking that phrase), but any rational ones amongst their number have to admit that, in the second half, they were destroyed yesterday. Wave after wave of attacks, mostly kept out by the ever-excellent Shay Given, galvanized Old Trafford to a pitch that’s been sorely lacking in recent years.
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When Rio ridiculously opted to chip Bellamy and left the golf-club wielding weasel free to rush goalwards the sense of deflation was unbearable. Cut to twenty minutes later, or whatever it was city fans claim, and the euphoria was palpable. Affecting coolness and maintaining the aggressively anti-Owen posture that I’ve affected all season simply wasn’t an option. Only utter barminess can suffice in such circumstances.
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And what of that man from Argentina? Before the game all you could hear was reds lustily bellowing the hastily rewritten ode to the ‘money grabbing whore’. The boos that rang out when they announced the teams seemed to give him a physical slap. The contrast the to the love that chased him down the tunnel last time he walked on the OT turf could hardly have been more pronounced.
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As for his performance. He scurried and chased in familiar fashion, and his closing down lead directly to the first equalizer. But, as ever – and this isn’t the revisionism of the jilted lover talking, it’s what I’ve maintained from the off – in front of goal he lacks the clinical composure that someone else deployed to such devastating effect.
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To his credit though, when the city players converged on Bellamy to celebrate his second goal, it was noticeable that Tevez ambled back to the centre circle, alone with his thoughts. I’d have offered him a penny for them, but I know that his owners wouldn’t countenance anything like such a shoddy deal.

posted by Royton Red @ 7:55 PM