Manchester United’s 19th League title: Stuff of the Champions! (Part 1)
There are still two days for the EPL season 2010-11 to officially end, and the title is already decided. Manchester United will be titled the Champions come May 21, 2011 for the 19th time in the English football history beating the record of their
strong rivals, http://www.senore.com/Football-soccer/Liverpool-c39809.
No matter how much Sir Alex Ferguson tries to play it down, he finally has “knocked them off their f***ing perch”. That’s no easy feat considering the League title score was only 18-7 when he picked up the laurels in 1989. As embraced by the United Manager,
they never hit top gear throughout the course of the season but then they will be deserved Champions as no team never quite came close to catching them since http://www.senore.com/Football-soccer/Chelsea-c38786’s massive dip in form near Christmas.
Modern football is not about having a great first team XI anymore. Now it’s all about keeping a healthy (see http://www.senore.com/Football-soccer/Arsenal-c38429), happy (see Chelsea) squad (see Liverpool) and an able manager (Manchester City). A team that didn’t have a consistent starting XI for 67
games in a row, it took the squad’s quality, and the manager’s leadership ability to get the best out of his unit even when injuries plagued his resources.
United only managed to win five games on the road, the lowest number of away points they have collected in any Premier League season. However, they made Old Trafford as their bastion, picking up a record 52 points from a possible 54 in their 18 matches played
there.
They are still to pay their last league game against Blackpool on Saturday where they’ll be rightfully, it can be argued, knighted Champions. If they manage to win on the last day of the season, that’ll be the lowest points tally gathered by a team who will
officially be Champions, come Saturday. It will again be a record breaking season, although, Sir Alex Ferguson might not be too enthusiastic about remembering this record for long.
For a team that lost two of their best players in http://www.senore.com/Football-soccer/Cristiano-Ronaldo-c9629 and Carlos Tevez only two seasons ago, not reimbursing the pounds collected from the sales in transfer windows and hugely relying on the old legs of Scholes, Giggs and Van der Sar (he is
a keeper however and not the first player to play past the mark of 36), it is not an easy feat at all.
Moreover, they were without their regular Captain, http://www.senore.com/Football-soccer/Gary-Neville-c14447, who retired mid-season, and still managed to do a league and European Double; not to forget the FIFA World Club Championship. It should be noted however, that Neville hadn’t retired when United
won all these accolades at the start of the season. He just was not playing as regularly as he did in the season 2007-08 for one reason or another.
To be continued in part 2…
The write up bears the views of a diehard Manchester United fan
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