Wednesday, 30th September 2009 – KO: 19:45

I remember when the Champions League draw was being made a month or so ago, the team from “Pot Four” that no one really wanted to draw was Wolfsburg.

It is actually quite strange how they found themselves in Pot Four alongside all those sides which are more than likely going to be the “whipping boys” of their respective Groups when Bayern Munich were in Pot One but there you go.

Wolfsburg are, of course, the current Bundesliga Champions but just a couple of seasons before that, they were on the brink of relegation. It is almost like the equivalent of, say, Wigan winning the Premier League this season.

Some achievement.

Their success last season was largely down to their strike partnership of Grafite and Edin Džeko who scored 54 goals between them in the Bundesliga and 71 goals between them in all competitions which is obviously quite remarkable.

Both of them should play in this game.

Okay, that’s the bad news out of the way.

The good news is that whilst they score plenty, they can concede a few and in this season’s League campaign, they have scored fifteen but conceded fourteen in the process (seven matches played so far).

The other good news is that we are Manchester United and this is Old Trafford and our record at Old Trafford in Europe has been exceptional in recent seasons.

We have had our scares so far this season but have just that solitary (bizarre!) defeat to Burnley spoiling an otherwise perfect record and we do seem to be a very hard team to beat… even when a team thinks they have us beat.

I’m not going to over-analyse this one further. It should be a very entertaining game and I do expect plenty of goal-mouth action.

The only thing I can see spoiling this bet is if we are overly cautious and go for the patient approach but this has tended to be a trait in our away European games rather than at home. If our strikers bring their scoring boots, we should score against Wolfsburg and if Wolfsburg’s strikers get a sniff, they could well score one or even two of their own.

I would be very surprised if this is a low-scoring game and so I’m going to bump up the ante with the bet here.

The bet is 8 Points OVER 2.5 goals @ 1.66 with BetFred.

Well I must admit that when I placed this bet, 0-0 at Half-Time was NOT what I had in mind.

It was a strange first half with Wolfsburg coming out all guns blazing for the first 20 minutes when you would normally expect it to be the other way round when we’re playing at home in Europe.

After that first 20 minutes or so, we did start to get to grips with Wolfsburg and started to impose ourselves a bit more.

All things considered though, it was probably Wolfsburg who enjoyed the better chances in the first half and for a defence that concedes a lot of goals, they did seem very tight and organised and they caught us off-side time and time again.

As the first half came to a close with the score at 0-0 I felt that the only thing that would rescue the bet was for Wolfsburg to score first in the second half.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long when they took the lead after around 56 minutes from the head of the towering Dzeko.

It’s not the first time we have seen United spurred into action from being behind (and it surely won’t be the last) but you could sense immediately that they had finally upped it a gear and thanks to a huge deflection from a Ryan Giggs free-kick, we were level again just a few minutes later.

At 1-1, the game almost settled back into the same pattern as when the game was 0-0 but you just got the sense that United, having been given the wake-up call, were gunning for that second.

It duly came from a nice passing movement around the Wolfsburg box which was finished very calmly by Michael Carrick.

A huge sigh of relief came immediately after that goal. There was no doubt that United entered this game expecting to win but great credit must go to Wolfsburg who did not come here to lie down and they will surely be following us into the next stage of the competition.

A couple of other things are worth mentioning here.

Firstly, Dimitar Berbatov started on the bench with Michael Owen given the nod but with the latter having to come off after around 20 minutes due to a groin strain, Berby was given his chance to shine.

He took it magnificently and at last showed a bit more of the class that we paid £30 Million for. So much of the game revolved around Berby after his introduction and whilst he didn’t score (never looked like scoring to be honest) he did more than enough to suggest that he might finally be reproducing some of the form that made us sign him in the first place. I’ll probably write another article on this very soon.

The other player who stood out here tonight was Michael Carrick. He has been largely overlooked so far this season. Fletcher has been immense and it is hard to leave out Scholes and/or Anderson. Carrick was starting to look like the forgotten man and with Hargreaves on his way back, things were starting to look a bit bleak for Carrick.

However, not only did he show remarkable composure for the goal, he also produced some excellent passes and great tackles. His overall performance tonight was top class and he has surely pushed himself to the fore of Fergie’s thinking once again.

Valencia had a decent game but he is already starting to be quite predictable. He will get the ball at his feet, stop the ball, do a couple of jinks but always flick it to his right and attempt to cross from a more or less standing start from behind the opposing defender.

There were a couple of occasions when the ball was begging to be crossed in first time whilst he was on the run but he always chose to trap it and go through the routine above.

If he can learn to play the ball in that bit quicker and with accuracy when the moment demands it then we might just have a player on the right again.