As the transfer period comes to a less-than-frantic finish (still 10 days to go though), the Sun (leaders of the shitlist) are busy looking for solutions to Manchester United’s ‘lack-of-goals’ crisis. Gee thanks; I wouldn’t have imagined that Ferguson or anyone else in the Manchester United coaching staff could have handled the problem on their own.
If you didn’t know a thing about Sir Alex Ferguson, Newcastle United or Manchester United, you might look at the story being spun and say – yea, why not?
But at the moment the story is very weak and falls flat on its face on two accounts:
One, Manchester United, crisis or not, are not a club who buy in panic. SAF and the management staff have specific plans in place to deal with the current situation (the injury crisis, lack of goals, etc) and these plans have been prepared well in advance of the start of the season. As much as I hate to have seen Rossi go, it’s history now and we have to concentrate on the resources we have.
Three of our strikers are due to return by the end of August – Louis Saha, Dong Fangzhou and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. Granted, apart from Saha these players are not world-beaters at this point in their careers but both give Ferguson the option to play 2 men up front and after seeing United struggle with 4 men (Giggs, Scholes, Carrick, Hargreaves) playing through the center of the pitch against Manchester City, it would be good to go back to our traditional 4-4-2 and build on that.
Two, Martins is settled at Newcastle United – he was bullish about Newcastle’s prospects this season before the matches even started and while he might not have been on fire against Aston Villa he did score an impressive brace for Newcastle United against Bolton and he is easily the club’s in form striker. Buy-out clause or not, Newcastle United and especially Sam Allardyce will fight tooth and nail to keep Martins at the club and with only 10 days left till the end of the transfer season (and with Newcastle United themselves busy trying to bring in two more players before the end of August), it looks unlikely that Martins will be allowed to leave.
Regardless of whether you think Manchester United need a new striker or not, the reality is that we have suffered a spate of injuries to all our key players (Ronaldo, Rooney, Anderson, Saha) and as soon as even one of these four get back into the starting XI, the goals will come a lot easier.
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