Manchester United: Now or Never!

Article by Tony Gillies

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Sitting watching another woeful performance from United this season on Wednesday night, struggling against a Sunderland who are in the middle of a relegation battle but they had more fight and looked 100 times more organised than we did. I had flashbacks to the good old days and players we used to have - the likes of Keane, Beckham, Scholes, Giggs (in he's prime) Ronaldo, Gary Neville, Jaap Stam; this list could go on for days but let me get on to the main point of this article.

The starting 11 on Wednesday due to injuries and suspension wasn't our current first team but when you think about it, it wasn't far off and to challenge for silverware anytime soon we need to buy; not necessarily expensive world class players, just players who give us a squad big and deep enough for the matches we have injuries and suspensions that they can fit in unnoticed, like Nicky Butt, Phil Neville, Ronny Johnsen, John O'Shea, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer etc. used to. They never disrupted the system or form of the team. The players who come in now are not United standard players and until this changes we will not be challenging for the main honours. Look at Manchester City for example; Sergio Aguero out injured for 6 weeks but Edin Dzeko comes in and scores the goals which meant they were in no real rush to get Aguero back until he was fully fit. Yeah, City may have paid a lot in transfers over the past 5 years or so but in the last 3 or 4 windows they have bought cleverly; they have filled positions that needed filling and bought players to be used as back up. Chelsea have a similar but not quite the same luxury.

I've heard many a United fan in the past couple of days say Juan Mata isn't what we really need....have you been watching us lately? He is exactly what we need. We are not creating nowhere near as much as we should be, we look scared to attack, we run out of ideas and most of our attacks peter out and we end up on the back foot looking vulnerable defensively. A lot of this has a lot to do with Robin van Persie and Wayne Rooney being out injured but that brings me back to my earlier point the players brought in in their absence - Danny Welbeck and Javier Hernandez just don't live up to the standards expected. Welbeck don't get me wrong has played a lot over the past 6 weeks, through the busy Christmas schedule and beyond and has bagged 6 goals in that time but when I see him in the starting 11 I never think we're going to score 3 or 4 today and Chicharito as we all know never has the same impact when he starts like he does as an impact substitute. I've heard a lot of support for Shinji Kagawa during the transfer of Mata but he's been with us for nearly two full seasons now and has never lived up to all the hype, yes he's played out of he's favoured position but surely he should have adapted to the left hand side role by now. He doesn't look happy at United and I will not be surprised if he is sold in the summer. Nobody can tell me that we won't be more dangerous going forward with a front 3 of RVP, Rooney and Mata for the remainder of the season, I believe with the introduction of Juan Mata we will finish the season inside the top 4.

I believe big changes are coming over the next year or two and if we can bring in a few players who are happy to be rotated and ship out some of the deadwood, we will be back where we believe we belong but until David Moyes sorts this mess of a squad out I'm afraid we could have a similar season next season to the one we are experiencing this campaign.

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