With this being the penultimate match in our Champions League group stage and being between the top two teams, separated by just a single goal in the goal difference column, it is probably fair to say that it is the group decider.

Basel will still have something to say about the final placings but the winner from this one will certainly qualify from the group and will fancy their chances of finishing in top place.

Our performances in the Champions League so far this season have generally left a lot to be desired. We have won the last two against Otelul Galati but neither performance was convincing and 2-0 in each game probably flattered us, to be quite honest. I’ve said several times that had Galati had a decent striker in their side then we could have been found out in both games.

However, whilst Fergie and the players have obviously sorted things out at the back and we are starting to look a lot less vulnerable, it has come at the expense of the free-flowing, high-octane, “cavalier” style that saw us score shedloads of goals at the start of the season.

With so much at stake going into this match, I have to believe that we will be seeing more of the “safe” football from our players tonight.

Benfica proved to be quite a handful when we played them at their place in the opening fixture of this group and looked particularly strong in defence.

What all this points to, to me, is a game where neither side will be particularly adventurous, will try to keep things tight at the back and grab the one goal that could prove to be the winner.

The bet will be 2 points Under 2.5 goals @ 1.85 with Victor Chandler.

Like most other United fans, I was looking forward to the return of Ashley Young and Tom Cleverley for this one but the news that Cleverley will be out until Christmas is a major blow but Young should return following the toe injury that has kept him out of action for a few weeks.

I’m not going to over-analyse this one. Despite Swansea’s record at home this season (they are currently unbeaten) and despite how well they performed at Anfield the other week, we really should be winning this game.

By the time we kick off, the result of the Manchester City/Newcastle game will be known which might put some added pressure on us to win but I do believe that we’ll come through well this evening but I’m going to go for the straight win because even though the price is nothing to write home about, I do think that it represents value.

The bet is 5 points United to Win @ 1.57 with Bet365.

Upside Down 'S'

Eagle-eyed observers (I must admit, I cannot count myself as one of these, I completely failed to notice it myself) have noticed that the ‘S’ in the Sir Alex Ferguson Stand sign was actually positioned upside down (see image) and will have to be flipped over.

Obviously, this was probably the fault of some local Manchester City supporting worker who are well known for their shoddy standard of workmanship.

However, what is worrying about this is that the sign was probably the one and only thing that has taken place within Old Trafford in the last twenty-five years that Fergie knew nothing about and was not done under his watchful eye… and look what happened!

This obviously doesn’t bode well for when the big man eventually steps down.

Actually, another thing occurred to me about this sign the other day. It has been placed on the North Stand. Probably the reason for this is because the North Stand is the biggest stand and so it was seen as the biggest possible tribute that they could have paid to Sir Alex.

However, it is generally agreed that whoever takes over after Sir Alex steps down will have one big pair of shoes to fill in the same way that previous managers often felt that they were working under the shadow of the great Sir Matt Busby. Indeed, Frank O’Farrell (the man who immediately followed Sir Matt) has often said that he “felt Sir Matt’s presence everywhere”.

Now, whoever takes over Sir Alex will be sat in the dugout every other Saturday with Sir Alex Ferguson’s name right in front of him in twenty foot high lettering!

Hopefully, it will inspire rather than intimidate but time will tell!

To be quite honest, there’s not an awful lot to report about this rather dull game and the day will be remembered as the day the club sprung a massive surprise by renaming the North Stand to the Sir Alex Ferguson Stand. That we scraped past Sunderland thanks to a Wes Brown own goal (good to know he’s still doing the business for us, by the way!) was almost incidental.

Yes, today was all about Sir Alex Ferguson and he did say after the game that he thought that the players were playing with added anxiety because they really wanted to win for him.

There was one funny moment in the second half when the linesman gave a penalty against us only for the referee to go over to him, have a word, and the decision was overturned to a free-kick for us. To be fair, replays showed that it wasn’t a penalty but there were a couple of hands flying around as the ball flew over the penalty area but it did have an air of the referee saying to his linesman, “United are supposed to win today, this is Fergie’s 25th Anniversary, we can’t spoil the party”.

We did improve in the second half and only some excellent saves from Westwood, the Sunderland keeper, kept us down to just the one goal but Sunderland rarely threatened and Fergie will no doubt have been pleased at yet another clean sheet – our fourth in a row since the City debacle.

The day belonged to Fergie though and he was clearly as shocked as anyone when he saw the covers removed to show the North Stand renamed. It was also announced that a Philip Jackson (the guy who sculpted the Sir Matt and Holy Trinity statues outside Old Trafford) statue of Sir Alex has been commissioned to sculpt a statue of Sir Alex and I can’t wait to see that – the one of Sir Matt is quite breathtaking.

Anyway, for now, we go into another International break and it’s two weeks until we play our next match – away to Swansea which could be a toughie – Swansea are doing well at home.

There are many memorable dates in the history of Manchester United – some represent our greatest triumphs and some record harrowing tragedies but today is a date to celebrate and smile about for today is the 25th Anniversary of the day that Sir Alex Ferguson was appointed manager of our great club.

After the Busby Babes of the 50s and the Holy Trinity of the 60s, Manchester United spent the best part of two decades in the footballing wilderness. Of course, we picked up a few FA Cups during those decades but we could only look on longingly as Liverpool seemingly picked up the League title season after season with no end in sight as our last league success (1967) started to fade into a point in time that only the elder statesmen amongst our fanbase could remember.

We were generally a club going nowhere fast when Alex Ferguson took the reigns but he knew from day one that it was a travesty that such a massive club, with such a rich history at home and in Europe not to mention average crowd attendances of around 60,000 was not truly consistently contesting for the top honours every season.

The changes he made immediately have been well documented elsewhere and I won’t go into great detail here but it is fair to say that the effects of those changes were not immediately apparent and for a little time in his first few seasons, there was some speculation as to whether or not he had been the right man for the job after all and rumours that he was one game from the sack at one stage towards the end of the eighties have never really gone away.

However, he had a plan and knew that Rome wasn’t built in a day. The pieces started to be put into place one by one so that by the start of the 90s, the glory days had once more returned to Old Trafford and have remained for the last twenty years of Sir Alex’s reign.

His genius was confirmed and Manchester United are now truly regarded as one of the elite in world football with a present (and quite probably a future) to match their history.

There are bound to be many Manchester United fans out there who only weren’t even born, or at least were too young to remember, anyone other than Sir Alex in charge of the club and I can only say to those people that they’re the lucky ones! We had a fair few managers between Sir Matt and Sir Alex – some well-intentioned but out of their depth at a club as big as United and some decent enough but lacking the vision of Sir Alex – the vision to see the fundamental problems that existed at the club that were preventing us from fulfilling our true potential.

Of course, some of them may have seen the problems but knowing that a problem exists and actually rolling up your sleeves and doing what is necessary to put it right (and succeeding) are different things entirely.

Sir Alex Ferguson was the first manager at United since Sir Matt to basically deconstruct the club and put it all back together on more solid foundations piece by painstaking piece.

That he did this once was incredible. That he has continually made the changes necessary, building title-winning team after title-winning team to keep us at the forefront in world football with his unrelenting drive for success is, quite frankly, super-human.

As we sit here today, looking at Manchester City challenging for “our” title, I have to smile. I’m thinking Leeds, Aston Villa, Blackburn, Newcastle, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea. All of these clubs and their many managers have pitted themselves against Sir Alex and Manchester United in the past and, yes, on occasion, with success, but overall, Sir Alex remains the last man standing – he’s sent them all packing at various stages over the last twenty years and you just know that he relishes the challenge that Roberto Mancini, Manchester City and another billionaire owner brings to the table for it is these challenges that keep him going.

One day, and as Fergie nears his 70th birthday the day comes ever-closer, we will have to deal with the prospect of a Fergieless Manchester United but not today. Today Sir Alex has work to do and we can all rest-assured that he will be applying every last molecule of his experience, knowledge, talent and drive to the task. And for that I, and the millions of Manchester United fans around the world can only say a barely worthy, “Thank you Sir Alex!”

We’ve all had cause for complaint about the fixture lists down the years and Sir Alex himself has had the odd moan but I must say that it is jolly decent of the Premier League to pit us against Sunderland on the eve of Fergie’s 25th Anniversary in charge of United because Sunderland currently comprises a significant part of Fergie’s Manchester United past.

Managed by Brucey and featuring an entire defence of former Manchester United players, it’s going to be like an old boys re-union out there this afternoon. Lovely.

Of course, the pleasantries and hand-shakes will come before and after the match. For the ninety minutes in-between, there’s the serious business of three points to be won and Fergie won’t be expecting any gifts on that score.

Possibly due in part to the bombshell that Gyan dropped on Bruce just before the season was due to start but Sunderland’s form has been all over the place so far this season. They have only won two of their opening ten games but have drawn four and lost four. However, when you look at the scorelines a little more closely, they haven’t been beaten heavily by anybody – losing by the odd goal in all four defeats. When you also consider that they have already faced the likes of Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and the in-form Newcastle then it’s not such a bad record as it first appears.

They do seem to be like this every time we play them at Old Trafford, too. They haven’t beaten us here but they have held us to the odd draw and we’ve never scored more than two against them in recent seasons.

Generally, I would expect more of the same again this time ’round because Fergie is clearly placing more emphasis on us keeping it tight at the back than scoring shedloads at the other end but the bookies seem quite convinced that this game will have at least three goals in it and I suppose I wouldn’t rule out a 2-1 scoreline here but I think the bookies are going a bit crazy on us here.

I’ve been completely out of sync with United so far this season. When I think they’ll win by a big margin, they’ve scraped by. When I think a tough match lies ahead, they’ve won comfortably! However, I do believe that this afternoon’s game will be a far closer encounter than the bookies believe.

I expect us to win it but perhaps not by more than one goal.

The bet is 2 points on Sunderland +1.5AH @ 2.12 with Victor Chandler.

Well, Fergie sprang yet another breathtaking surprise with his line-up for this one. There were no great shakes at the back with De Gea, Jones, Ferdinand, Evans and Fabio (the omission of Evra was interesting) and 75% of the midfield was quite normal – Nani, Anderson and Valencia but stuck right in the middle there was Wayne Rooney.

Rooney the midfielder? Is this a vision of the future or was Fergie just having a little experiment? I don’t know but it worked… kind of.

Up front, we had Berbatova and Owen to complete a team which looked to have plenty of goal threat about it and I was quite confident that my view that we could win this one 3-0 or even 4-0 would prove correct.

When Valencia put us 1-0 ahead after just eight minutes, I was even more confident.

However, we seemed to play well within ourselves having got that 1-0 lead and with Rooney doing his best to be Paul Scholes, gone were the penetrating runs as he instead chose to ping passes around – some of which were mere passes back to the defence or even the goalkeeper.

I think I mentioned in a recent post that perhaps there was a feeling of… I don’t know… boredom (???) with some of these group stage matches amongst our more experienced players. It’s as though they just don’t get their juices flowing anymore.

When the draw was made for this Champions League group stage, I think we all were quite happy that we had been handed as easy a draw as we could reasonably expect but, in some ways, it might have actually been better had we been handed a draw similar to the one Manchester City have had.

It was noticable that some of our best players on the night were the younger ones who haven’t had as much Champions League experience. Jones and Fabio provided plenty of dynamism on the flanks and it was a Jones run and cross which actually led to our first goal. Fabio ventured forward on several occasions but was often thwarted by the Galati defender Costin (who had a great game ) but he was at least trying to drive the team on to greater heights when several seemed happy to just plonk around the field for the remaining eighty minutes following our opener.

As the minutes ticked by and we continued to fail to get our second goal, the Galati team seemed to grow in confidence and belief that they could perhaps pull off something of a shock in this one and De Gea had to be alert on several occasions and no more so than when a shot on target was deflected by Ferdinand but he still managed to adjust his hand and knock it away.

In fact, De Gea’s performance was a big positive from this match. He pulled off a few saves by actually catching the ball solidly on several occasions (as opposed to punching it out or something) and his distribution was usually excellent. Already the bloopers from his opening couple of games seem a long time ago now.

Again though, we were largely fortunate that we were playing against a side that struggles to score at the best of times. If Galati had their own Chicharito or someone of that ilk then they could well have given us all kinds of problems.

Anyway, as the match wore on with the score still 1-0, there was always the hope that we would finally grab that second that would put the match safe and it finally arrived after around 81 minutes when Rooney had a blast from outside the box which looked to be going well wide before it hit Sarghi leaving their goalkeeper completely wrong-footed and helpless as the ball hit the back of the net.

So, despite barely seeming to get out of second gear in this Group Stage, we now find ourselves top of the group thanks to our slightly superior goal difference over Benfica (who we play next, by the way) and on the one hand, I suppose we should be pleased with that as this is the object of the Group Stage, after all.

I just can’t escape the feeling that some people aren’t taking this early stage of the competition very seriously though. Rooney… a deep-lying midfielder?

Firstly, apologies for completely missing the Everton match out. As some of you may have noticed, the website was completely down for much of Saturday due to a problem at my hosting company’s end and so I simply couldn’t get my preview online.

As it happens, I’m not sure that I would have won the bet because I was convinced beforehand that we would need to score more than one goal to win the game as I was quite certain that Everton would score. However, we kept a clean sheet which was great to see – even if it was just by the thickness of a goal-post.

Anyway, this post is about Otelul Galati who come to Old Trafford this evening for our fourth Champions League Group Stage match.

We finally got a close look at Galati in our last match when we played them over in Romania a couple of weeks ago and they were a decent side – well organised and capable enough but they just lacked quality and composure in the final third. Our 2-0 scoreline made it look like a comfortable evening’s work but it was anything but comfortable in truth and it was only when Rooney put away his second penalty right at the death that we were able to consider it won.

However, they come to Old Trafford this evening with their Champions League campaign hanging by the thinnest of threads and it will be interesting to see how they respond to that set of circumstances. On the one hand, it might inspire them to just go for it or they might just crumble under the pressure. Their strikers looked nervous enough when we played them in Romania, quite how they will perform tonight is anyone’s guess and could go either way when the adrenaline kicks in.

Domestically, they have got their act together a bit since we played them and they have won their last three games although they have been close with Galati scoring just five goals in those three games and winning each by just one goal. Interestingly – and perhaps tellingly – all five of their goals were scored by midfielders and defenders (Defender Sarghi and Midfielder Paraschiv grabbing two each).

As for us… well, obviously, we’ve had mixed fortunes since we last played Galati but after conceding six against City, we have managed to keep two clean sheets in our last two games and we have generally looked a bit stronger defensively for a little while now – that City results sticks out as a complete aberration.

There are a few stories of injury problems doing the rounds at the moment. Giggs remains injured but he is now definitely joined by Smalling who has broken his foot and apparently Young (some sort of toe injury?) and the seemingly luckless Tom Cleverly who has picked up another ankle injury. Vidic misses out through suspension.

However, Fergie still has plenty of other options at his disposal and with this being our first game at OT since the City debacle, I’m sure he will want the players to go out and give the home fans a proper show and let anybody else watching that Old Trafford remains a formidable place to visit and one or two dodgy results haven’t changed that.

He will undoubtedly remind them of our last game at OT when we played Basel and almost got the shock of our lives when we became extremely complacent at 2-0 up and almost ended up losing the match 3-2 and will surely let the players know that any repeat of that will see the hairdryer make a comeback.

So, I can see a pumped up United out there tonight and I really wouldn’t want to be a Galati player right now. There will be goals from United in this game, that’s for certain. A goal from Galati would be something of a surprise but I suppose it cannot be totally ruled out.

The bookies believe this will be something of a massacre too it seems and we’re as low as 1.08 with some of them to win the match and as low as 1.35 to win by two clear goals. In fact, you have to go with the notion that we can win by three goals in order to get a decent price.

I think it has to be remembered that whilst we perhaps laboured to the 2-0 win in our last game against Galati, we ourselves went into that game under some pressure after our own indifferent start to the campaign. Had we won our opening two games then we may well have won that one far more convincingly and I think we would have scored earlier.

Galati don’t concede too many and so there’s an element of risk to this bet but I really do believe that we can play with a bit more relaxation in this one tonight – not complacency and not taking Galati lightly – but back to our more free-flowing football where the players play on instinct rather than thinking about every little detail.

Galati are almost certain to be overwhelmed by the occasion and, if we can get at them early and grab an early goal then I do believe that we can go on to score at least three.

The bet is 2 points Man Utd -2.5AH @ 2.02 with Bet365.

Playing a game just 48 hours after your last is not something is normally welcomed but for most United fans, this match couldn’t come quickly enough. A different day, a different competition, a different challenge.

It was also, obviously, quite a different team than the one that went down against Manchester City at the weekend.

Ben Amos was given a chance in goal and did superbly well. The defensive line-up was Fabio on the right, Vidic and Jones in the centre and young Fryers was given the chance to build on his fantastic display in our first game against Leeds but this time played over on the left and, as far as I could see, didn’t put a foot wrong again all evening.

Seeing Vidic get through a full 90 minutes was great but, as usual, he sailed close to the wind on occasion and picked up a booking for a messy foul with the game barely a few minutes old – he probably needed this 90 minutes and it cast some light on why he wasn’t selected for the game against City at the weekend.

The midfield was something along the lines of Diouf on the left, Valencia on the right with Park and Cleverly in the middle.

Cleverley managed to get in an hour on this is comeback from injury so that was a welcome sight and Park put in a typically hard-working performance and added some composure to the midfield.

Up front, we had Owen and Berbatov and these two – Berba, in particular, did their causes no harm whatsoever with fine displays.

Anyway, the game itself was probably as you would expect, United dominating possession throughout and piling the pressure on Aldershot from the off. As already mentioned, Berba had a great game and really did look like he had a point to prove. He often gets accused of being lazy (or at least, looking a bit disinterested at times) but that criticism couldn’t be leveled at him in this game – he was everywhere and he thoroughly deserved his goal to open the scoring after fifteen minutes and then played a fantastic assist for Owen to grab our second just before half-time.

However, there was one moment later in the game which perhaps sums Berba up. He went on a fantastic run almost from one box to the other, showing great strength and determination to get himself into a position where a goal looked likely only to slip it wide with an almost nonchalant effort. It could be that he was just knackered after such a lung-bursting run or it could just have been Berba being Berba –   it’s hard to decide but it is moments such as those that divide people’s opinion of him to such an extent.

However, for a guy who has almost become a forgotten man this season, he showed great character in this game and did as much as anyone else on the pitch.

The goal of the match, however, was our third which came just after half-time from Antonio Valencia. With the ball at his feet, hovering a few yards outside the penalty area, everyone expected him to try to pick out a pass or perhaps attempt to go back down the outside but he stunned everyone by unleashing a terrific swerving drive that beat the Aldershot keeper all over the place. It was so good and so unusual that even Antonio himself broke into a smile.

Whilst we always looked in control here, Aldershot had one or two chances of their own, especially towards the end of the match when Fergie started to make his changes (Michael Keane on for Fryers, Paul Pogba on for Cleverly, Ravel Morrison on for Diouf) and we perhaps started to take our foot off the gas but the timing of our second and third goals (just before and after half time) had knocked most of the stuffing out of the Aldershot players who were just looking for a souvenir of the occasion by the end of the game.

And so we go through to the Fifth Round, another 3-0 victory with plenty of the youngsters getting their chance to shine.

We are, of course, now getting towards the stage of the competition where getting drawn against tougher opposition is inevitable but I hope that Fergie will give these lads another chance if the draw is kind to us again when it is drawn this Saturday.

It’s taken me a few days to get around to writing this review for obvious reasons because I do always like to watch at least one replay of the matches before writing the reviews but I wasn’t in such a great rush to watch this one over again.

However, I watched the match over and it wasn’t actually the painful experience I’d expected. For the opening 10-20 minutes, it was all Manchester United and we had City penned into their own half for much of it with something in the region of 70% possession.

When Ballotelli put City ahead after 22 minutes it was a complete stunner because, up until that point, they’d hardly had the ball.

It must be said though that whilst we had a lot of the ball, we didn’t do an awful lot with it. City were very organised defensively and throughout the match, Joe Hart had very little to do – and this was our main problem in the first half.

However, 1-0 down at half-time was gutting but there was absolutely nothing to suggest the massacre that was to follow and I think most United fans, whilst knowing that the next goal would be crucial, had confidence that we could turn things round.

Whatever Fergie said to the players at half-time was obviously brief and to the point as the players were back out on the pitch and ready to go several minutes before the second half was ready to commence.

But within about a minute of the restart, Evans made a mistake against Ballotelli and tugged at his arm in an attempt to salvage the situation, the referee copped him and had no choice but to send him off for preventing a clear goalscoring opportunity. Whatever plans Fergie had put in place for the second half were destroyed right there in one moment of madness. It was always going to be a uphill task in the second half but that just made it almost impossible.

It has to be said though that for ten minutes or so, we continued to give as good as we got and had Ashley Young not fluffed a great opportunity when he received the ball in the box and scored then we still might have seen a different outcome here because that could have made it 1-1 and perhaps at that stage we could have played a much more defensive game and settled for the point.

It did sort of show that we still weren’t out of the game though and the players tried to do the only thing they knew they could do and get that goal back as soon as possible. This obviously meant that we were vulnerable at the back and with a man short, City were able to exploit the wide open spaces and this ultimately led to our downfall as City have such great passers of the ball that they were able to do so quite easily.

It does show the fine margins between success and enormous failure at this level though. We needed that little bit of luck or that little bit of magic to make it 1-1 but instead we got hit by a sucker punch as Ballotelli got his second on the hour mark to make it 2-0.

At this stage, the game was pretty much up but with half an hour to go there was still plenty of football to be played and so the United players once again tried to do what comes naturally and attack. Ten minutes later, Aguero got City’s third and then it really was game over.

In hindsight, what the players did next was either the craziest of the most courageous thing ever seen but they kept ploughing forward leaving enormous holes at the back but they wanted the goal, they still believed that they could pull this off and when Fletcher curled in a beauty (the best goal of the game, to be honest – unfortunately quantity, not quality always counts in this game) to make it 3-1 with at least ten minutes still to play.

In hindsight, this was perhaps the worst thing that could have happened because it suddenly seemed to make the players think, “Hang on, if can grab one more in the next few minutes then City’s heads might be all over the place for the last few minutes – we can still do this!” and so they went for it.

We had a couple of corners in the next few minutes which City defended well but it did show that again, with a decent delivery and a bit of luck, there was still a goal to be had for us and the players just went for it with everything they had. All the defenders were coming forward and players like Welbeck ended up chasing back doing the jobs of players like Evra! It was just kami-kaze football.

However, I feel that I must take issue with something Fergie said after the match about this stage of the game as he seemed to be suggesting that when it was 3-1/4-1, we should have just accepted that and just defended in order to avoid what ended up a rout.

I can possibly understand it once it went to 4-1 but at 3-1, there definitely was a whiff of a comeback – it was a faint scent; mere tendrils on the horizon  but it was there and I, for one, want to see my United team never accept defeat when we need two goals in ten minutes although I will accept that with hindsight, once City went 4-1 ahead, the chance had gone and with just injury time to be played, we should have just kept the ball and played down the clock.

Instead, we continued to try to fight, like a boxer who has been knocked to the canvas four times in a round but keeps getting up on wobbly legs, swinging away feebly only to walk onto yet another right hook.

So, yes, this could and probably should have ended in a 4-1 defeat and not 6-1 but, the record books aside, does it really matter? Fergie made a point about the damage this result did to our goal difference column (ten goals in one match is a devastating blow) but, at this stage, the five points behind is the crucial part. I do tend to agree though that the players should have shut up shop at 4-1 and they probably should have known that.

However, I can also understand how the players would perhaps not know what to do. Do they make the decision to do that, at Old Trafford, against our fierce local rivals by themselves? Why wasn’t Fergie or at least Phelan down on the touchline at this stage, just telling them, “It’s ok lads. Give this one up. Just don’t let them make this completely embarrassing now”? At least the players would have known that they had the manager’s blessing to give up the ghost.

I dunno. I just thought it strange that whilst Mancini was always making his way down to the touchline at various stages to bark out a few instructions, our own management team stayed in their seats throughout. Fergie just seemed a bit too eager to shift the blame onto the players but I think that in hindsight, he must see that he shares some responsibility for the end result.

Anyway, the day definitely belonged to City but I would reiterate that it wasn’t the one-sided massacre that the end scoreline suggests. The first half was definitely an even contest but City always just looked that bit more in control. Defensively they were solid and organised and they contained us to the point where we were restricted to half chances at best. They also worked extremely hard down the wings to nullify Young and Nani and little David Silva was awesome. Their strikers were obviously on the money too.

For us, our defence looked extremely creaky as it has done for much of the season and I still cannot understand why Evans started ahead of Vidic and I can only think that Fergie felt that Vidic was still short of match-fitness. This is probably a moot point though because I have no doubt that Vidic would have pulled on someone’s arm at some stage and got himself sent off just as Evans did!

I said in a recent post that I think Fergie has to come to some sort of decision with the defence and soon because all this swapping and changing is not doing anyone any favours. Ferdinand still brings a lot to the table but he clearly cannot do it in every game these days which means that Fergie has to make at least one change every other game or so but he will know as well as anybody that our success down the years has been built on a stable defensive unit that pretty much play together week in and week out where changes are enforced due to injuries and suspensions – not merely to “keep players happy/match fit” etc.