“My grandma could have scored that” – one of those clichés that football fans love to use. I’m pretty certain that my grandma wouldn’t score a single goal if she was selected for Man United but that’s what I shouted this afternoon when Berbatov shot wide, unmarked from five yards. Football’s quite simple really, score more goals than your opponents and you win…
…so if United at the moment are conceding and gifting more goals than is considered acceptable, let’s try and score more.
In every Premier League game this season bar Sunderland away, United have created and missed a mind boggling number of opportunities to score. Only two year ago Edwin and his defence broke records for Premier League clean sheets – an incredible achievement. United aren’t usually associated with clean sheets, teams have always felt we’ll give them a chance, just the problem is we’d always score another goal. Look back to the Treble year of 98/99 – only 13 clean sheets in the league, but we scored 3 or more league goals in a massive 12 of our games.
My point being, ok if we’re conceding goals, the nature in which some have been conceded is dreadful but we’re not taking enough of our chances. This I admit is a reactionary blog – we should have walked in at half time today 5 or 6 goals ahead. Dare I say, we lack the ruthlessness of Chelsea in front of goal. I’m not even talking about half chances…good pretty clear cut chances. It’s almost as if we feel bad to be putting teams to the sword, ‘it’s ok, we’ll only score 1 or 2 goals so we don’t embarrass you’ – instead we’re embarrassing ourselves a bit.
I know there is more to our form and more to winning a game than just taking chances but certainly at Bolton, at Everton, at Fulham and against West Brom today that would have been the difference.
I’m intrigued to hear what people have to say on the matter…one freakish own goal and one individual error cost us today, I can’t help but feel it’s more of a concern that so many chances are being missed rather than a bizarre own goal and a rare rare error being cited as reasons for concern.
If you believe we lack heart or we lack confidence then how would you fix this? I don’t want suggestions of signings as we know that can’t happen now and look at our squad when written down – it’s strong, we can’t use our squad as an excuse.
I personally would have no problem with us winning games without keeping a clean sheet – goals win you matches, clean sheets just guarantee no defeat.
This is an open debate, no rights, no wrongs…apart from the fact that my gran shouldn’t be picked!