UEFA CHAMPIONS LEAGUE: ALEX FERGUSON hoped defence would win Manchester United this game, or at least prevent them losing it.
Pedants would argue it was the wonder goal from Cristiano Ronaldo that actually won it, though the manager’s point remained valid. This was a much better defensive performance from United than the one that saw them jeopardise their Champions League progress in the home leg.
Ferguson always trusts his attackers to score enough goals if they have a solid platform on which to build and he must have been relieved to be able to name his strongest back line for once.
Rio Ferdinand was back to partner Nemanja Vidic for the first time in five games, and significantly of the four matches when the normal centre-back pairing was disrupted United lost one, at Fulham, drew with Porto in the first leg of this quarter-final and needed the intervention of Federico Macheda to win the others.
On the other hand, the last time Ferdinand and Vidic played together was the 4-1 home defeat by Liverpool, exactly where United’s troubles seemed to begin. Certainly their confidence has not been the same since and Vidic in particular has some ground to make up in the player of the year stakes after suffering from exposure to Fernando Torres.
Perhaps more important than the talk and the teamsheets, however, was how United dealt with a team they knew could hurt them. At least they did not fall behind after four minutes, as they had in the first leg, and neither did they fall for the comedy free-kick routine that had opened the floodgates at Chelsea. When Hulk tried something similar to Fabio Aurelio’s effort from Porto’s first free-kick, Van der Sar was alive to it.
What United did instead was take a leaf out of Porto’s book and shock the home crowd with an early goal of unanswerable simplicity. The Porto defenders never had a chance of stopping it because there was no way they could have seen it coming. Ronaldo simply bypassed them by shooting from 40 yards out, hitting the ball so cleanly that one had to feel sorry for Helton, the one man who did have plenty of warning yet still could not get a hand to the shot.
While that put United in a winning position, it left them unsure whether to stick or twist and by the half-hour stage they were doing more defending than attacking, some of it a little shakily. The main reason was not sitting too deep and inviting Porto on to them, it was presenting their opponents with too much of the ball. Michael Carrick undid some good work breaking up attacks in front of his back four by giving the ball away. Ryan Giggs and Dimitar Berbatov were equally guilty, the latter repeatedly making life easy for Porto’s defenders by asking too much of Ronaldo with balls hit hopefully long. Just as Ferguson had warned, the upshot was Porto saw a lot of the ball and United spent too much time trying to win it back.
United seemed to come out for the second half in search of the second goal that would make the tie safe and were instantly caught with too many men upfield when a move between Ronaldo and Anderson broke down. Lisandro brought the ball all the way down to the edge of Van der Sar’s area and, though the shot from Raul Meireles flew wide, it was a warning that a Porto goal would leave United needing to score again.
Nothing like as deft or incisive as they were in Manchester, Porto were playing a patient game. The away supporters had to suffer Van der Sar having a clearance charged down and Cristian Rodriguez shooting narrowly wide.
Mostly, though, they had to suffer another blunt performance by Berbatov. Nothing the Bulgarian tried seemed to work. It was no great surprise when he was withdrawn after 70 minutes and ironic that just as Berbatov departed United produced their best counter-attack of the half, a sweeping passing move that Rooney was unable to finish.
For all their composure, United hardly produced any more of those all night. While Ferguson may be right about the importance of defending, he just might be overestimating his strikers.
Guardian Service
