FAC: West Ham v United
We’re inviting some of our Twitter friends, and now resident thought sharer Iwan Lehnert, to share some of their ‘Pre and Post Match’ thoughts with us from now on. You can still enjoy my nonsensical, confusing punctuation buffets below their proper good ones…
Iwan (@IwanLehnert):
Ergh. Festive period, over. Work period, re-commenced. But how good was that holiday season for United? I don’t think we could’ve asked for any more, reasonably. Great results, good performances, and thanks to a belated Wearside-based Christmas present, we’ve got a bit more distance from City than we had before at the top of the league. But forget all that now, because it’s CUP TIME.
…..no, not that one, the smaller one. Yep, there it is.
The FA Cup, as good, historic and enjoyable a competition as it is, can never take priority over the Champions League as the cup competition that I want United to succeed in. Just won’t ever happen. I’m not saying that I don’t want us to at least try and get to Wembley this season, but it’s gotten to the point where I fail to be too distraught if we find ourselves out of the competition (this is in stark contrast with European exits that tend to provoke the most anguished of mourning periods). West Ham away isn’t a nice draw, either; tough game against a tough team. We barely beat them at home in November, but after the festive period, it feels as though we’ll be comfortable with more rotation and pull off a decent performance.
Two big things to come from the manager’s press conference; Nani has started training again and Rooney will be back in a fortnight. The former is good news, whichever way you slice it. Valencia hasn’t been terrible this season, but it’d be stretching the truth to unreasonably stretchy terms to suggest that he’d been great. Getting rid of one of our few options out wide in the January transfer window when we’ve still got four months left to win stuff is the very opposite of wise, despite the yo-yo nature of his consistency. He can be maddening to watch, and he is hands down the very worst taker of a corner kick in the history of the Milky Way Galaxy, but he has talent; we all know it, and we can’t afford to cut our options down if there’s no one to replace him.
The news about Rooney isn’t exactly great, but it does make you wonder how long it’s been since we could afford to have him injured and not have our season completely derailed? Since Ronaldo was at the club, probably. Of course, a lot of that is down to Van Persie’s arrival, and I’m not saying that I WANT Rooney to be injured, but we’re in a better position to cope with his absence than we’ve been in years, and that’s definitely some comfort.
One Rooney spin-off: it’s good news for Kagawa. It’s hard to stake a claim for a place over the course of two games, but he should definitely start tomorrow, and I can’t think of many fans who don’t want to see him show the club what he’s made of.
Prediction: 1-3 Concede first, second half resurgence, RVP comes off the bench to score one.
Brett:
I think I’d settle for just about any result, if it meant not seeing that chicken dance; as long as United win; I enjoy the game loads; we score lots of goals – good goals too mind, none of that scrappy stuff; don’t concede any goals; pick a starting eleven I like; do lots of nice passes and that; and I’m allowed to get away with my abysmal use of the semi-colon.
I don’t know how to begin to predict what to expect from this game. For arguments sake, the opposite of whatever Iwan has said.
It’s on the telly.
Prediction: 2-3
Goals: Danny with all three. Why not.
