As always, the Community Shield will be billed as a “friendly” match but there’s not likely to be very much friendship shown on the pitch this afternoon. These two sides will almost certainly be contesting the title again this season and neither will want the other to get one over on them at any stage of the season – starting now.

Just how seriously the two managers will be taking this one is likely to be shown in their starting line-ups and I expect nothing less than full strength from both to start with although predicting what this is in the case of Manchester United is as tricky as ever.

United took part in an open training session at Old Trafford and just about everyone apart from the long-term injured took part including Evra and Carrick (who suffered an ankle injury against the Irish XI during the week and was expected to be out for a fortnight as a result).

Chelsea have been uncharacteristically quiet in the transfer market this summer and so there are unlikely to be many surprises about who turns out for them so expect the usual suspects although it might see a return to action for Essien who, given his injury problems last season, could be like a new signing for them.

As for the match itself, I expect the usual feisty encounter but I do actually think there’ll be goals in this one today. Chelsea were scoring for fun towards the end of last season and we have plenty of attacking options and plenty of goalscorers. It is quite ironic that the player who hasn’t been banging them in for club or country for quite a while is actually Wayne Rooney! This is the type of match that should bring out the best in him though.

As usual, not the kind of match to get too heavily involved with from a betting point of view but I think a small bet on the OVER market might be worthwhile.

The bet is going to be 2 points OVER 2.5 goals @ 2.29 with Canbet.

Review to follow…

Despite a few odd positional decisions by Sir Alex (Evans playing at left-back, for example) the United team that took the field for this one looked much more like United than most of the line-ups used on the USA Tour.

Vidic was back in defence, Valencia was on the right, Carrick was in the centre of midfield and Rooney and Owen were paired up front. All great to see.

Valencia, in particular, was very impressive and showed just what we have been missing in some of the other pre-season games with his constant running at the Irish defence and superb crosses into the box.

As for the match itself, it is difficult to know where to start. The first goal came from a mixture of indecisive defending and horrendous bad luck as Park blocked an attempted clearance and saw the ball rebound straight into the net. As someone once said, “They all count”.

The second goal came from a brilliant piece of play from Michael Owen. At first, it looked like it had been an own goal but replays showed that Owen had deftly lobbed the ball over the keeper despite being under intense pressure from a couple of defenders. It was the kind of strike that shows that Michael Owen still has the striker’s instinct flowing through his veins as strongly as ever.

And that is how the first half ended. 2-0 to United. Rooney had huffed and puffed without much success and probably deserved a bit more in the way of free kicks than the referee gave him. Despite some decent passing and possession football from the Irish players at times, they weren’t really able to make very much of it and Vidic, in particular, probably can’t remember an easier 45 minutes in a United shirt.

As the second half was about to commence, it was announced that Owen and Rooney were being replaced by Berbatov and Hernandez. Hernandez can do no wrong at the moment and every United fan is trying to keep their feet on the ground about him and not hype him up too much for fear of putting too much pressure on the lad’s shoulders.

The problem is, Chicharito just won’t play along and within seconds of coming on, he had put the ball in the net to give United a 3-0 lead.

At this stage, it was all looking a bit ominous for the Irish side and more goals looked inevitable.

It took little under fifteen minutes for the next as Valencia went on a bit of a run, using his right foot at every touch, before bringing it onto his left and firing into the bottom corner. Yes. Valencia scored a goal with his left foot!

A few minutes later, Park scored his second and United’s fifth with a lovely curling effort into the far corner and then Evans (who had been getting forward constantly throughout the match) headed home well to make it six.

Mulcahy spoiled it all when grabbing a goal back for the Irish side following something of a mistake by Smalling who over-committed himself in a wide position which left him hopelessly out of position.

A few minutes later, Hernandez was brought down in the penalty area and the referee awarded a penalty which was duly converted by Nani with typical audacity.

And so it ended 7-1 to United.

Whatever anyone says about the quality of the opposition here, there were tons of positives to take from this game. One of the worries pre-season has been “What will we do if Rooney gets injured? Where will the goals come from?” Well, seven goals here from six different scorers and not a Rooney goal in sight would suggest that we have more than enough goals scattered around the squad for that to be less of a concern than some would make it out to be.

The return of Valencia and Vidic was also great to see. Valencia, in particular, looks every bit a United player now and was the clear Man-of-the-Match for this one.

Owen showed he’s still got it so long as his legs hold out, Chicharito can’t stop scoring and I don’t think Smalling was beaten in the air once all night.

The one bad point of the evening was when Carrick had to come off due to some kind of ankle injury. I am not sure at this stage how serious it is (it didn’t look particularly serious – he walked off the pitch) but given that this was his first bit of football for months, it wasn’t an ideal comeback for him.

All in all though, a great night’s work by the lads. Sunday’s match against Chelsea should be enough to blow away a few more cobwebs and then it will be full steam ahead for Newcastle!

Chelsea won 4-1 on Penalties

Established wisdom suggests that frequent changes to a club’s manager is not an ideal recipe for success. Chelsea, to their immense credit, have probably changed their manager more than any top flight side in the last few years but their general performance level on the pitch rarely seems to dip.

This game was always going to be our biggest test of the pre-season and would act as a real barometer as to where exactly we are up to without Ronaldo and Tevez.

The signs generally look pretty good.

We came flying out of the traps and when Nani fizzed in a pretty spectacular goal (again) from some distance after just 10 minutes it looked very much like we were going to steamroller Chelsea and we had our chances to take a 2-0 or even 3-0 lead into the break.

However, whatever Ancelotti said at half-time did the trick as Chelsea came out with more more purpose and closed United down far quicker, denying them the time and space that they enjoyed in the first half.

When Carvalho levelled after 52 minutes, it wasn’t exactly a massive surprise as Chelsea really were coming back strongly.

What happened after around 70 minutes left a sour taste in the mouth though as Evra, on one of his forward runs was deliberately blocked off by the elbow of Ballack and was decked whilst Chelsea broke forward. Normally, Evra would have chased back and got into position but on this occasion, he was unable to and so Chelsea found themselves outnumbering the United defenders on the edge of our box. Lampard seemed to have a lot of time and space to blast the ball past Foster to give Chelsea a 2-1 lead with 20 minutes left to play.

United huffed and puffed to score the equaliser but it never really looked like coming until, in the dying seconds, Rooney showed great strength and composure to coolly score with his left foot over the advancing Cech.

All things considered, a 2-2 draw was a fair result and the game was extremely entertaining.

It did, of course, mean that the first “honours” of the season would be decided on penalties.

We have had a mixed bag of results on penalties of late whilst Chelsea had failed to win any of their previous five shot-outs.

However, you wouldn’t have thought so as just about every Chelsea penalty taken was excellent whilst two of ours were simply woeful and so Chelsea took the 2009 Community Shield on penalties with a spot-kick to spare.

The bad news from the day was that Nani dislocated his shoulder and will now have to it out the start of the season which is a great shame because he has really looked good during pre-season (although he is still very inconsistent, even during a match – in this game he scored a cracker but then was caught ball-watching as Carvalho simply ran past him to score with a low header for Chelsea’s opener).

Berbatov continues to impress and Rooney looks like he’s going to have the best season of his United career so far and if he doesn’t hit 25 goals this season it will surely be down to something unfortunate like an injury.

On the not so positive side, Foster doesn’t fill me with a great deal of confidence I’m afraid. He couldn’t really be blamed for either goal but there were one or two nervy moments which resulted in some pretty poor kicks which went out for throw-ins or barely went high enough to clear the first line of the Chelsea forward players.

However, with the news that Van Der Sar is out injured for the first few weeks of the season at least, he will be given his chance to prove himself, I just hope he can handle the responsibility and come through this big test with flying colours.

Penalties

Frank Lampard 1-0 Ryan Giggs
Michael Ballack 2-1 Michael Carrick
Didier Drogba 3-1 Patrice Evra
Salomon Kalou 4-1 -

Bayern Munich won 7-6 on Penalties

This was the Final of the Audi Cup and was basically a home game for Bayern Munich, played as it was, at their Allianz Arena in front of pretty much their own fans but as pre-season friendlies go, it did at least have a bit of bite to it.

As expected, Bayern started out well and almost went ahead when a Gomez blast shuddered United’s crossbar but we coped with most of it quite well with what looked like an eight man defence at times!

Berbatov came closest to putting us ahead when an excellent overhead effort also came back off the woodwork.

The player who really seems to have enjoyed being so involved so far in this pre-season is Nani who was in the thick of just about everything United did here tonight. He still gets some things wrong and, on occasion, seems to overcook things (e.g. he will do a bit of trickery to beat the defender, get himself space for a cross but then stop and do it all over again) but he certainly seems to be responding well to any suggestions that this could be a make or break season for him.

He’s also showing a lot more strength and the nonsense dives and rolling around on the floor seem to be leaving his game.

I’m a big Berbatov fan and one of his staunchest supporters against those who haven’t been too impressed with him so far but even I didn’t like some of his body language on the pitch tonight. He’s not slow to let his disdain be known if any player does not do something exactly how he expected it to be done and Nani was the brunt of a few of his little tantrums tonight. (It reminded me of how Cantona sometimes used to treat Andy Cole all those years ago, actually).

Valencia got another 20-30 minutes on the pitch and whilst he didn’t have the same impact that he had yesterday, he showed one thing that Ronnie never showed us when an attacking move he had worked hard on broke down i.e. he didn’t kneel down and start praying to the heavens, he got straight back on his bike and got back into a defensive position – something his fellow midfielders will surely be heartened to see.

The game had its moments but all in all the two teams cancelled each other out and a draw was probably fair although Bayern Munich might disagree with that, and I wouldn’t argue if they did.

And so we had to go to penalties.

Sixteen were taken and thirteen were absolutely top-notch penalties. Edwin tried his best to put the Bayern players off with delaying tactics but I’m surprised he persevered with it because it clearly wasn’t working and, of the two keepers, the Bayern keeper performed the better almost saving on a couple of occasions and saving two whilst Van Der Sar only saved one and guessed wrong on every other occasion.

And so the inaugral Audi Cup went to the hosts Bayern Munich which, all things considered, was probably the diplomatic thing to do.

Penalties

Ryan Giggs 1-1 Alexander Baumjohann
Anderson 2-2 Edson Braafheid
Nani 3-3 Hamit Altintop
Patrice Evra 3-3 Danijel Pranjic
Wayne Rooney 4-4 Jose Ernesto Sosa
Darren Fletcher 5-5 Andreas Ottl
Paul Scholes 6-6 Holger Badstuber
Jonathan Evans 6-7 Daniel Van Buyten

Very much a game of two halves as United steamed off to a 2-0 half-time lead but Boca Juniors came back at us almost non-stop in the second half, grabbing their goal after 55 minutes.

This was a much sterner test than anything else we have encountered so far in pre-season and Fergie expressed some disappointment in our performance after the match.

There were positives to take away from it however as Anderson (yes, Anderson!) blasted in a screamer of a free kick so perhaps that box in the post-Ronaldo checklist can now be ticked.

Some of the other boxes were almost certainly ticked by debut-making Antonio Valencia who was terrific and scored our second goal.

A couple of slight negatives were the fact that Vidic picked up a bit of a strain just before the match and so didn’t play and Wes Brown also had to go off with some kind of muscle injury.

The midfield generally didn’t cope very well in the second half with the quick pace of Boca Juniors and were forced into several errors but this match will surely remind them that the time and space afforded us in the Asian Tour games was a luxury and we won’t get anything like it from now on in.

Still, it’s another win, another couple of goals and another couple of goal-scorers.

The Tour of Asia was wrapped up in fine style as United knocked eight past Greentown.

It’s fair to say that this was a match against a standard of opposition far below that which we are accustomed to but even so, as an exhibition of attacking flair, this was an absolute joy to behold.

The match started off at a crazy pace with both teams going at it full pelt and Greentown gamely gave as good as they got for 25 minutes but then United took a grip of proceedings and started to pull away.

The first half was really the Dimitar Berbatov show and everything revolved around him.

I am a big Berby fan and I loved to watch him even when he was playing for Spurs and he seems to have taken a vow at some point in his life to never do anything in orthodox fashion. Nothing is ever simple with him. It has to be a flick, a backheel, an outside of the boot pass or nothing at all.

Of course, not everything he attempted came off and when it did go wrong, it looked badly wrong but when he got it right, it was absolutely sublime.

Michael Owen scored two in the first half, the second of which came from an excellent bit of skill from Berby. Berby himself scored one and Tosic scored one.

The second half started off with more of the same as yet again, a backheeled through ball put Nani in front of goal, a bit of Nani skill later and the ball was in the net for goal number five.

What all of this showed is why it is so unfair for people to judge what Berby does simply by counting the number of goals he scores. He might not score thirty goals this season but he will be significantly involved in at least that number given the opportunity.

On around 58 minutes, Ryan Giggs came on and he has had a really good few games in this Asian Tour as you get the feeling that he is thinking that this may be his last season and he intends to enjoy every second.

However, he scored a thirty minute hat-trick to let everyone know that maybe he doesn’t feel that he needs to hang up his boots for a little while longer!

The home side managed to get a couple for themselves towards the end of the game and they deserved them because the game was far from one-way traffic and they did cause problems throughout the match and never let their heads drop.

And that wraps this Asian Tour up. I’ve enjoyed watching it. The standard of opposition might not have been absolute top drawer but the games have been entertaining and I’m sure the players will have taken a lot from it.

Certainly anyone writing off Berbatov or questioning the acquisition of Owen will have to put the daggers away for a little while longer yet.

A much sterner test this one as United found themselves behind not once but twice but managed to come back on each occasion to eventually win 3-2.

This game was actually very entertaining to watch and there were some eye-opening performances from the opposition, not least of all that of two goal Dejan Damjanovic.

Owen came on for about 30 minutes and still came within a whisker of scoring yet another goal but the damage was done by his other strike partners as Rooney, Macheda and Berbatov scored one apiece.

Macheda’s goal was perhaps the pick of the bunch as he showed great composure to round the keeper and still fire it in with his left foot but Berbatov’s goal is noteworthy because he has now had three headers in three games and this was perhaps the hardest of the three but he directed the ball well with power from a standing jump and it went right into the bottom corner from around 8-10 yards out.

Rooney’s goal looked like a spectacular header on first glance but replayed showed it actually came off his shoulder as he was probably put off slightly but the jump of the defender in front of him.

There were some flashes of very good play from United but they still look like a team that is just getting back into some kind of rhythm at the moment as far too many passes went astray and the final ball was often lacking.

With little in the way of natural width, we played through the middle a lot and Seoul had an eight man defensive wall waiting for most of our attack so often, we were trying to thread the ball through the eye of a needle and it just didn’t come on.

It’s going to be interesting when Antonio Valencia finally joins up with the squad to see if we can start to get a bit more width and a few balls whipped into the box from wider angles.

For now though, three games, three wins and eight goals is not bad regardless of the opposition.

Well, there were no goal-keeping nightmares in this match so Malaysia rarely looked like getting much from this game.

United again sped ahead into a 2-0 lead and were unable to stretch it further however when a really high score looked a distinct possibility.

United’s goals were scored by Macheda and Owen so that is now Owen’s second in two games for United and whilst it is impossible to get too carried away after two friendly matches against inferior opposition to that which we are likely to face in the season ahead, it is still encouraging as both goals he has scored have been typical Owen goals, right place, right time, making it look so easy.

Fergie has high hopes for Macheda and has said today that Macheda was the reason he didn’t splash the cash this summer. The lad still has plenty to learn (he gives the ball away far too frequently for my liking with sloppy passing) but it is so easy to forget that he is still only 17 years old.

If he can keep his feet on the ground and make steady progress then it is quite scary to think what he could be like in a few years time.

There was little else to talk about in this match except for one moment where Rooney seemed to see the red mist again which is something I thought he was starting to get under control – the fact he lost it in a friendly during a tour which is essentially a PR exercise, is a little disturbing.

Still, two pre-season matches, two wins, five goals and four different scorers. This is starting to shape up like the good old days.

The first match of our pre-season was a pretty entertaining affair with plenty of talking points.

Of course, it WAS only a friendly and it WAS just the first game in a pre-season programme the only purpose of which (we’re constantly reminded) is only to get the players up to match fitness.

With these things in mind, it is important not to go too overboard, especially with the negative comments.

The one player who really looked ready to go today was Rooney. Playing in a more central role, he was behind a lot of the good work up front for United. Scoring the first and then brilliantly setting up Nani for our second.

Around the 51 minute mark, he brought down a long kick beautifully and in almost the same motion, deftly lobbed the keeper but the ball landed just inches wide. If this is a Wayne Rooney who is a little unfit, needs to get back up to match speed and was suffering in the Malaysian heat, well, he is going to have one hell of a season this year.

If that was sublime then seconds later we had the ridiculous as Ben Foster took his eye off the ball and subsequently completely failed to control a backpass and allowed the opposition striker to run in and score.

Malaysia had already scored at the very end of the first half with a very good lob over Van Der Sar who found himself a bit too far off his line.

So, that made the score 2-2 and no one would have predicted that when we raced off to a 2-0 lead.

Owen came on after an hour and within 25 minutes, he had scored his first goal which proved to be the winner.

There are some out there who will still be sitting there, pens sharpened, waiting for Owen to get the slightest injury before the “I told you so” articles appear but for now, they will have to choke on their own bile. Owen’s goal was a typical predator’s finish.

Giggs went in with the keeper for a through ball, both players collided and the ball squirmed free. Owen had already anticipated this and was alert and on the move, picked up the loose ball, set himself and fired into the bottom corner.

I know this is only a pre-season friendly and means nothing in the great scheme of things but that goal was massive for a host of reasons.

Others who impressed were Berbatov who produced some moments of magic but then missed a free header which a man of his size should be burying but I still think we will see great things from Berby in the coming season.

Nani was given a full 90 minutes and impressed and frustrated in equal measure throughout the match, he seemed to lack a little bit of confidence to me, especially when one on one with a defender and didn’t quite seem to know what to do and often made the wrong decisions.

Still, plenty of positives came out of this pre-season opener and it all bodes well for the coming season.