Thank God it’s Thursday

Manchester United had innumerable reasons to be wary of Wednesday’s trip to the Luzhniki Stadium. The most talked about, and with good reason as anyone who watched the game would attest, was the artificial pitch.  People who have been brought up on playing in grass-less squares of hard mud and pebbles are of course going “What the heck are you complaining about, at least it’s green!”. Another was that it was a trip to Russia, which we all know from our Geography (and more importantly History), is not the easiest place to visit. For reasons both… well, geographic and historical. The historical reason being, United have never beaten a Russian club (ha, gotcha all you commie-bashers!).

There were other minor concerns of course. Rooney was missing due to injury sustained over the international inconsequential break. And now my alter-ego who is a Scouse will take over.

Oh no, we’ve lost Rooney to injury!!! What is to become of us. After allllll that we do right season after season, we always have the worst injuries ever. And who cared if Rooney played or not anyway, England were already through! We lost our best player! This is it. Why do I even live. I should just swallow a beach-ball, inflate it inside me and die a gory death.

Also missing were Evra, Giggs, Fletcher and a general host of other people who would be called members of the first team. But as the team to actually follow Douglas Adams’ philosophy, United didn’t panic (Note the heavily intricate reference to Loserpool again). A point would’ve been more than a fair enough takeaway from this minefield of a trip, so one can imagine how 3 points was a pleasant surprise indeed.

Talking of minefields, the Luzhniki Olympic Stadium might be one of the few in the world to have a FieldTurf which is approved by Fifa. Now we all know that doesn’t count for much, but it’s something they’re very proud of so we’ll let them have this one. All of you who thought Cricket was the only game where the pitch mattered (and baseball. Where the pitcher matters), well, get Sanjay Manjrekar to do the pitch report on the Luzhniki I say. This ground is probably to football what the Ferozshah Kotla is to cricket – no bounce, plenty of turn, and you better be a very good striker of the ball. And off the ball. It took Scholesy around 20 minutes to figure he was lifting his leg too high to control a bouncing ball, it took Berba 45 minutes+a half-time talk to figure why the ball was spinning away from goal every time he shot, it took Nani 86 minuted to figure how to get a cross into the box, and it has taken Antonio Valencia 16 games to learn how to score. And now he seems to have gotten the hang of it.

To be fair, CSKA were the perfect hosts. They sat back and let Scholes, Anderson and O’Shea figure out what was going on. They didn’t venture too far out of their half, a situation that Necid, playing all alone up front was patently not happy with. It was a night that neither team’s strikers much enjoyed, Berba being perennially pained by the the fact that the final pass was simply not reaching him and Necid being pained that CSKA were not reaching the final pass itself. Eventually though, all’s well that ended well.

Thankfully, the Milan-Madrid game lived up to its billing and saved the matchday. With Chelsea randomly thrashing Atletico and a host of other upsets all around, the Matchday was leaving quite a lot of people disgruntled indeed. As is very evident from the last post on this very blog (snicker). So a nice goal fest with 45 year-old goalkeepers making mistakes and 50 year-old striker’s benefiting from them… ah, the future of the Champions League is in good hands indeed.