Football: Ferguson's tactics shown red card

Location: Manchester, England

In a contest between two of the best sides in Europe, the team from England opted to change their natural tempo and game mentality to combat their opponents’ strengths, now where have we seen that before?

When Chelsea beat Barcelona and Bayern Munich over the space of a month to win last year’s Champions League, they either “parked the team bus in front of the goal and made no attempt to get on the ball and play” or “they showed incredible backs to wall spirit and a never say die attitude”. Whichever of these views is closest to your own is likely to indicate how enamored you are with Chelsea Football club. And while Manchester Uniteds' tactical set-up and overall performance last night was nowhere near as defensive as that of Chelsea last year, the comparison is fair, the ideology the same, simply put, you play to win the game.

Not to go out in a blaze of glory, or with you head held high or any other cliché, but to win the game. All that matters is what teams name is in the hat (or correctly put, in one of those little balls, in a glass bowl, in Nyon, Switzerland ) for the next round, and you adopt the tactics that give you the best chance of being that team. For last nights' encounter, Sir Alex Ferguson moved his side away from what they do best, to what he thought they could do well enough. While selecting a starting line-up bereft of some of his best attacking players, his aim was that by adopting a more cautious approach it would cause Madrid to move away from a style of play that they had perfected in the past week.

Real Madrid came into this match, off the back of two victories against Barcelona where across 180 minutes of football they averaged just 34% of the possession yet had more attempts on goal (28 – 21), and almost 3 times as many attempts on target (14 – 5).

In those games, Madrid found a shape that was difficult to penetrate, and turned small bursts of possession into attempts on goal. Ferguson publicly branded them “the best counter attacking team in the world” and it was his fear of their ability with open space in front of them led him to leave Rooney and Kagawa on the bench, opting instead for his own counter attacking spearheads, Welbeck and Nani.

In regard to the aforementioned Nani, it this blogs position that while controversial, the red card decision was not the reason Real Madrid won the game. Being down to 10 men made it very difficult for Man Utd to attack in numbers once they had fallen 2-1 behind, but they conceded those goals due to the introduction of Luka Modric and good Madrid play rather than a numerical disadvantage. In fact it seems like the biggest affect the red card had on the game was the cover that it provided for Sir Alex Fergusons team selection and tactics. United are sure to cling to  the ridiculous notion that the final 35 minutes were likely to follow in the pattern of the first 55, and stories passed down through generations of Manchester United fans will paint Nani as a Franz Beckenbauer type defensive maestro certain to have single handedly repelled every Madrid attack had he remained on the pitch.

Sir Alex Ferguson settled on a tactical approach that owed more to minimising his opponents strengths than maximising those of his own side. An approach that he felt gave his side the best chance of winning the game. The only thing is, and it’s a kind of an important thing, they lost the game. Whether different tactics would have led to a different result is impossible to know, but it’s a question that he, his staff and Manchester United fans will be asking themselves. When you win, you don’t have to worry about those sorts of things, just ask Chelsea.