Rooney Proposes, Barca Stalks, Fletch Loved.

You know how bad the world around us is when the Telegraph, of all the papers, run a headline “Barcelona line up Cristiano Ronaldo bid” and follow it up in their article quoting the club as saying that Ronaldo is among a list of players they are ‘looking at’.

It’s simple, if you think about it; Barca = Big Club, Big Club Loves Big Player, Ronaldo = Big Player, So Barca Loves Ronaldo. It is this kind of specious Aristotlean Syllogism that papers get into, at times, that gets my goat. Not that I particularly detest the Greek thinker, but it gives one a rather convenient route of reasoning that results in pointless speculation; something that causes wastage of acres of webspace… ahem… I think I will stop talking about it here, right now.

Rooney goes down on one knee for United and also dreams of playing an all-English final. About the former, he dismisses talk of moving abroad, keeping his faith in the high standards of the English Premier League. It is inconceivable at this point that he would even dream of moving to another Premiership club and, since Beckham, there have hardly been any English players moving abroad in their prime. About his dream of playing an English club, I won’t mind it as long as we don’t face Chelsea or Liverpool; past experiences show how turgid such fixtures can be. An Arsenal-United final, on the other hand might be rather tasty for two reasons: one, they have always been full of incident and drama apart from the fact that both sides play good football and, two, it would mean Arsenal have played a lot of games and their extended Champions’ League involvement would stretch their smaller squad more than ours. I might have come across as slightly arrogant here, but if it was an English side, I would rather prefer the Arse.

Actually I’d gladly take Derby County, but then I wouldn’t be alive to see that happen, would I?

Meanwhile, Sir Alex is the latest to offer verbal fellatio to Darren Fletcher — no puns intended, all metaphorical. Again, all my opinions on the Lyon game are based upon what I’ve read, and I’ve read only glowing words for the Scottish One. Scott — that’s his name — over at the ROM blog questions if we’ve been too harsh on Fletch and, in hindsight, I’d have to say that he deserved a call-up purely based on his performances against Newcastle and Arsenal. Fergie did have a fair point when he indirectly hinted Scholes’ propensity to give away cheap free-kicks in potentially dangerous positions for Juninho to exploit when he said that Fletcher harries the opposition players without necessarily fouling them. Of course, Hargreaves could have been a good option, but the positives to take from the game is that we could cope without Scholes and Hargreaves and the frequent rotation of our central midfield. While parallels could be drawn with Rafa’s rotation policy, it’s worth pointing out that our replacements are good enough and have responded well, unlike those of Liverpool.

Ideally, we’d like a settled midfield pairing, but I doubt even Fergie knows what that would be.

And Ben Foster looks to return to action for United reserves after being out with injury for, like, ever.

End of story for the day. Will return tomorrow.