Fan Report: Manchester United 2-0 Tottenham Hotspur

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There’s a big pub on your right as you head towards the ring road away from Old Trafford called the Old Cock and nothing really sums up better what Spurs served up on Tuesday night – a large pile of old cock. From Redknapp’s neither one thing nor the other team selection to the sit back and wait for the inevitable attitude of the home crowd, everything about the whole evening was decidedly disappointing and half-hearted. By the end of the game though you pined for ‘half-hearted’ such was the limp & shoulder slumped performance of the majority of our side.

Those we know aren’t up to the job such as Bentley, Hutton and on current form Keane, gave typical performances but on the night they were joined in ineptitude by pretty much everyone playing forward of the back four. Palacios and Jenas were shocking in midfield, Defoe and Lennon anonymous up front. It was abysmal.

Snap question: How does this 2009 Spurs team score goals? Most reflex answers would list ‘crosses from Lennon from the right’, ‘knockdowns from Crouch’ and ‘from Huddlestone edge of the box pile drivers’. In his wisdom Harry decided to go into the game with none of these options available leaving indecision and cluelessness as the favoured options of most of our players when in possession. It was a game we could’ve won if we’d put in a half decent performance, but we never even gave ourselves a chance by starting with a weird formation and then playing with a frustrating ponderousness where one extra touch never, for some reason, seemed like a bad idea.

Gibson scored two beautifully taken goals, Berbatov gave the odd reminder of what a good player he used to be but United weren’t any good. Wellbeck, Obertan and De Laet looked out of their depth and Neville & Park the fringe players they are, but we couldn’t take advantage. From Dawson’s distribution to Keane’s first touch to Bentley’s woeful free kicks we were second rate. Ferguson was able to withdraw two of his ‘big’ players, Anderson and Berbatov, with plenty of the game to go as they’d done their job. Our equivalents never even clocked on.

The ground was well on the way to emptying well before the end, (the home fans as well as us, I mean). At the final whistle only Dawson and Bale made obvious efforts to acknowledge the efforts made by the travelling fans in forking out forty odd quid each for tickets and battling the traffic and rain on a school night; the rest slinked off quietly perhaps to swap shirts with the likes of Macheda and Tosic in private. If this was Redknapp’s attempt to make sure that no-one gets too carried away by all this top four talk, then he did a good job. What a stinker of an evening.

By MF

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