Harsh title you say? Well it's unacceptable that Manchester United at the moment cannot defend. It's unacceptable that we go into some games thinking its a divine right that we'll come away with the three points without even trying. Quite frankly, as far as defence is concerned, its been coming throughout the start of the season. We were poor at Southampton defensively and against Fulham. Spurs only served to expose that at the weekend so our fears were only being confirmed.
You didn't have to be at the stadium to notice the gap in our defence that Vertogehen (sp) dashed into for the first goal. Any quality team would have punished that lacklustre defending.
Then Gareth Bale was suddenly given the freedom of the park to race from his own half to our penalty box and put away a chance. The question begs; do we have a midfield?
I don't buy into that talk of how well we played in the second half because quite frankly, we'll win nothing if we only play 45 minutes a match. The only positive we can take from Saturday is that this realisation has happened quite early in the season---possibly early enough for us to save our season. But you bet all our opponents will have been watching that DVD and they'll know quite well how to get the better of us. Unless the manager can work our a defensive solution to the back line quite soon, the Demba twins will have a field day on Sunday.
What that first half performance has done is that it has knocked a great deal of confidence out of me going into games. If I were a manager coming up against United now, I'd know one or two ways to go about beating them. Get a player running at their defence or boss the midfield (which is not hard to do currently). That is a pretty worrying picture especially heading into Europe where the difference between victory and defeat comes down to a team's weaknesses.
We head to Romania to take on CFR Cluj and God knows they'll punish us if we head into that game with an aura of favourites. The more worrying upcoming fixture is on Sunday at the Sports Direct. United have to put on a bit of a show tomorrow to convince us that Saturday was just one of those days that has to be written off.
Anything less and we'll be the subject of mockery for the next few weeks. It doesn't help that this reality check has come at the time we are in the middle of a terrible fixture list so its really up to the boss and the players to stick their finger up.
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