Semi-Final Hoodoo Broken

Ole Gunnar Solksjaer’s Manchester United finally got past their hoodoo of the semi-finals by beating AS Roma in the Europa League semi-final. In truth, the job was done after the first leg itself. The second leg was a mere formality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EQnsebSVhM

Not Built To See Out A Game

In his pre-match press conference, Solksjaer mentioned the team’s inability to see out the game to navigate a problem-free passage to the final. He wasn’t far from the truth. David De Gea had to turn back the clock to the days when he won the Player Of The Year award consecutively. He repeatedly repelled Roma’s shots on target and was the Man Of The Match. If it wasn’t for him, we could be sitting here talking of a narrow escape or worse yet, elimination. While De Gea, was busy keeping out Roma, we also had chances to score ourselves. Edinson Cavani missed twice before finally giving us the lead.


Commendable Spirit Of Roma

You got to commend the spirit of Roma. They were facing a huge deficit of 7-2 when Cavani scored, they are on a run of 6 winless games across all competitions and like in the first leg, lost another player to injury in the first half, yet they didn’t let their heads drop. I was in two minds about watching this match but I chose to because we didn’t have a weekend match to watch. I wanted a fix of United. Seeing Eric Bailly and Donny van de Beek in the starting lineup further convinced me to watch. But I struggled to stay awake. At half-time, I was Netflix-ing in the early hours of Friday rather than catching up on sleep. While that was going on, Roma had overturned the deficit to lead 2-1.

Just Not Up To It

I switched back to the match and not long after, Cavani had equalised for us. As the match inched towards the 80th-minute mark, I felt it was safe to assume that we had secured our passage to the final and went to sleep. As I was scrolling through the social media apps, news came through that Roma scored the third and that is how the match ended. I have to admit that Roma deserved to be winners. It wasn’t the best of performance by us. Bailly and van de Beek looked rusty. Luke Shaw was making mistakes that he hadn’t made in a long while. Mason Greenwood looked timid and meek. You got a feeling that the team wasn’t fully focused and invested in the game bordering on over-confidence at having secured the result. Thankfully, not all the players were absent. Bruno Fernandes and Cavani were two such players that were in the game and thankfully for us they were. Sadly, this performance will have done little to convince Solksjaer to discard his favoured system of playing with 2 defensive central midfielders. Probably De Gea has done his chances of playing more regularly no harm.

Tricky Opponents In The Final

Moving on from the semi-final, we will face Villareal in the final and they are not going to be an easy team to face. We have beaten two other Spanish teams, Real Sociedad and Getafe to get to the final. But our record against Villareal has been bad. We have drawn all our previous encounters 0-0 in the Champions League. I remember those matches to be very hard-fought and tight. Wayne Rooney getting sent off for sarcastically applauding the referee, Gabriel Heinze’s season-ending injury in the same game and United’s group stage elimination in that same season have been the unfortunate memories of our matches against them. They are helmed by someone with Premier League experience in Unai Emery and Emery has a great record of winning the Europa League. It will be a very tricky final to navigate.



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