Sir Alex Ferguson has not had the greatest success in buying creative midfielders but United clearly lack the spark of genius
The rumour that Barcelona want to persuade Cesc Fábregas to return to the Nou Camp surfaced again at the weekend, but the man who really ought to be breaking the bank to sign the Catalan midfielder – or the nearest possible equivalent – is Sir Alex Ferguson. Although slow starts by Manchester United are nothing new, and experienced fans know well enough to keep their frustration to themselves until Christmas looms, Old Trafford's pleasure in a hectic win over Arsenal on Saturday could not disguise the side's lack of inspiration in the creative areas.
With Xavi Hernández and Andrés Iniesta providing the flow of passes for their forwards, Barcelona already have what United lack. Arsenal, of course, possess a superfluity of such players, including three of Saturday's absentees: Fábregas, Samir Nasri and Tomas Rosicky. For this vital early-season match against the London side, Ferguson relied on the 35-year-old Ryan Giggs to provide the creative spark behind his lone striker, Wayne Rooney.
Ferguson's occasional tactical eccentricity is part of his charm, but it was nevertheless astonishing to see Rooney left so obviously stranded for the first 45 minutes. On the way back from Old Trafford, a mental trawl through personal experience going back to the immediate post-Munich era threw up no examples of any United striker being so isolated. Rooney, as always, exploited his guile and worked his socks off to compensate for the lack of support, but United deserved to go in at half-time a goal down, and might have been dead and buried had Ben Foster not brilliantly saved an instinctive first-time shot by Robin van Persie, superbly set up by Andrey Arshavin, three minutes into the second half.
A few words from the boss saw United improve after the interval, Giggs getting closer to Rooney and the tempo speeding up. Even so they had to rely on a slightly questionable penalty – Sky's super-slo-mo showed that Rooney's knees were already buckling before he slid into the diving Manuel Almunia – and an own goal for their victory, which is good enough for three points but not really good enough for Manchester United.
The summer departures of Cristiano Ronaldo and Carlos Tevez were always going to exact a price in terms of attacking flair, and it may be that Nani and the newcomers Antonio Valencia and Zoran Tosic will make the most of the opportunity. But United would look a more convincing proposition if they had a genuine playmaker patrolling the central areas, providing a base of continuity.
Ferguson's mastery of the transfer market ensures that his successful investments outnumber his failures, but they seem to be concentrated in certain areas. He likes acquiring strikers, second strikers, wingers and deep-lying midfield players. Apart from the two veterans of the 1992 Youth Cup-winning team, his current first-team midfield roster, excluding wingers, amounts to Michael Carrick, Darren Fletcher, Anderson, the inexperienced Darron Gibson and the unlucky Owen Hargreaves: none of them is either suited or ready to be a replacement for Paul Scholes as the player who dismantles a defence with a single pass and pops up to score 15 goals a season. Like Giggs, Scholes no longer has the legs for the job in the biggest matches.
Perhaps the unhappy and expensive experience with Juan Sebastián Verón undermined Ferguson's faith in playmakers. United's most impressive performances since that time have been achieved with a line-up in which aggressive midfield players such as Fletcher and Anderson create the platform on which out-and-out forwards can perform. The flowering of the partnership of Rooney, Ronaldo and Louis Saha during the French forward's injury-free autumn of 2006 was a typical, if short-lived, expression of that approach.
Ferguson's reluctance to acquire a player of the type of Luka Modric, Joe Cole, Deco or Stephen Ireland – not to mention any of the clusters on show at Barcelona or Arsenal – is particularly odd since the man he most regrets failing to acquire during his time at Old Trafford is Paul Gascoigne. But then we have to remember that Ferguson is also the man who decided not to bid for Zinedine Zidane from Bordeaux in 1996 because he and his scouts, having watched the Frenchman closely, could not decide on his best position.
Then again, perhaps that says something about Ferguson's approach to the job. Free spirits are not really to his taste, and are only acceptable when they can demonstrate an irreproachable attitude to preparation. And yet who, of all the players under his command in the past 23 years, has done more for him and for Manchester United than Eric Cantona and Ronaldo, two men who represented individualism in its most extreme form? On Saturday, for all Rooney's marvellous efforts, his side lacked the spark of genius – a commodity United's supporters have come to take for granted.
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