United win in the League because 90% of the teams are scared of them and what they can do at their best. United have been a top club over about 21-22 years now and to only have 2 European Cups to show for such a sustained period of league dominance is honestly quite poor. I think thats a product of United having to play teams in Europe who aren't cowed by United's pedigree and will give them a real game instead of being mentally beaten before kick-off.
I couldn't agree more. I think Ferguson's relative failure in Europe will always hang over him when he comes to be judged at the end of his reign. And let's be honest, if Bayern Munich had had a better striker than Carsten Jancker they would have been out of sight in the 1999 Champions League final. They let United off the hook. John Terry slips over his penalty in the 2008 final… Fine margins make or break, but Fergie could quite easily be looking at a blank in the Champions League.
Talk of the 1999 side brings back mixed memories for me. The signing of Hyypia was inspired, but there was a flipside. When Edwin van der Sar left Ajax in 1999 he was interested in joining Man Utd, who had just agreed to let Schmeichel go. Utd weren't interested, and signed Barthez the following year. So his agent took him to Liverpool. He asked Houllier who his major signing of the close season was, and he said 'I've just signed this superb centre back from Willem II.' Van Der Sar basically said to his agent, "If this is their big signing, get me out of here.' And off he went to Juventus. We signed Westerveld instead.
I wonder what difference he might have made.
Good piece by the OP, but I disagree about the performance being more significant than the result tomorrow. The result won't change anything overnight, but neither will the performance. We know that Brendan will get the team playing tidy football and that their heads won't drop. We know he will do this for the rest of his tenure. We won't learn anything tomorrow that we don't already know, with the possible exception of how good Sturridge might be.
But we have to start winning at OT. We 've played ten matches this season against teams in the top half of the table, and we have lost five and drawn five. This has to stop, and tomorrow is the time and the place. Belief is what sets Utd apart from us, as much as anything else, and we can only start believing again by beating the likes of Utd. Gerrard touched on this in the interview he gave to the press yesterday: he said that had we beaten Utd at Anfield in September, when Halsey robbed us, our season would have turned out much better. And he's right.
