OLD TRAFFORD — After Lionel Messi’s sublime finish against Manchester City at the Parc des Princes on Tuesday night, some wondered how Cristiano Ronaldo might respond. There was an early header over the bar where you marvelled at the spring in those 36-year-old legs but, generally, he was a spectator.
Then, at the death, his supreme ability to see a chance fractionally before anyone else, a talent he had first shown at Old Trafford nearly two decades ago, rode to Manchester United’s rescue. As the watching Usain Bolt proved time and again over 100 metres, it is not how you start, it is how you finish.
As the anonymous star of a team that had been outplayed for much of the night, Cristiano Ronaldo waited until the last possible moment before making his mark. When Jesse Lingard laid the ball off in the Villarreal area, Ronaldo pounced and drove his shot into the net beneath the Stretford End off the bottom of Geronimo Rulli’s gloves. Then he threw off his shirt and drank in the applause as if it had all been pre-planned. The whistle went and Ronaldo, celebrating a record 178th Champions League appearance, marched off with the headlines.
Having been thoroughly outplayed for the first 45 minutes and having fallen behind to a team they had not beaten in five previous attempts, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s beleaguered regime would have settled for a point, which would still have seen them bottom of Group F.
Instead, they drew level through two other Portuguese speakers, a free-kick from Bruno Fernandes that was met on the volley by Alex Telles with the kind of aplomb that only Brazilian full-backs tend to manage. Telles slid on his knees towards the Stretford End in the way Solskjaer sometimes did.
If any team can claim to be a bogey side to Manchester United it is the one from a town in eastern Spain with the population of Clacton. This was the sixth time the biggest brand in world football had faced Villarreal and the sum total of their previous efforts had been four goalless draws and a defeat on penalties in the Europa League final in Gdansk.
After three defeats in four matches, Solskjaer and Manchester United needed not just a win but one delivered with style.
They had two World Cup winners, the man whom Sir Alex Ferguson rates above Messi as the greatest footballer of his generation. In Jadon Sancho and Mason Greenwood they had two of the brightest young talents in the English game. They went into the dressing room at the interval lucky not to be three down.
Even before kick-off, the weaknesses were obvious. Solskjaer was without three of his regular back-four. Unai Emery would not have required much analysis to have targeted the two full-backs, Alex Telles and Diogo Dalot, men who you suspect would not be at Old Trafford had not the pandemic squeezed all the money out of European football.
Telles scored his first goal for Manchester United and looked a sight more effective than Sancho going forward down the left. Dalot, signed by Jose Mourinho, gave another indication that at this level he is horribly out of his depth.
His tormentor-in-chief was Arnaut Danjuma, who was born in Nigeria, learnt his football in Holland and had come to Villarreal from Bournemouth. When he was growing up in Eindhoven, Danjuma dreamed of being Cristiano Ronaldo and to Dalot he would have appeared every bit as terrifying as the great Portuguese in his pomp.
Peak Ronaldo would, however, have scored. That he did not was due in part to the brilliance of David de Gea, whose missed penalty in the mesmeric shoot-out had cost United the Europa League.
A few short months later, De Gea exorcised some of the ghosts of Gdansk, not least with a double save from Boulaye Dia just when Villarreal appeared to have settled for the draw.
Much earlier there had been an instinctive tip over the bar from Paco Alcacer’s near-post header, a block with his forearm from Danjuma that saw the Spaniard round on a defence that was betraying him all too frequently.
They even included Raphael Varane, whose stumble allowed Alcacer clear on goal. The shot went wide and when a cleverly-worked free-kick was driven into the Stretford End by Alberto Moreno, who just before half-time, almost steered the ball past his own goalkeeper, you imagined Villarreal might pay for all this wastage.
They did not pay. They went ahead. Once more the contest between Danjuma and Dalot was a foregone conclusion. Danjuma muscled his way past to deliver a low cross that Alcacer, a centre-forward who had the misfortune to be at Barcelona at the same time as Messi, Neymar and Luis Suarez clipped home what seemed at the time would be a pivotal goal. That goal was yet to come.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3ijT9QR
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