Man United Season Preview:And the Champions kickoff!

Showing off is generally considered a distasteful trait in life. Right from when we are toddlers, we are schooled not to show of our bright new shoes, because Timmy doesn’t have one see? If you have nice shoes, you wear them to school and act as if nothing happened. It’s slightly different in sports though, because a lot of the point of a game itself is the other person NOT winning. Hence it is ok to  hold up your shoes aloft, parade it in open top buses and tell one particularly annoying kid how you now have one more shoe than he’s ever had. It is generally considered ill-advised however, to call out to everyone how you are going to have another pair of shoes by the end of that year. But then, ill-advised never meant impossible. Season previews always have words bandied about like hope, optimism, future, miserable sods and sex scandals. I say we add hubris to the list. Heck, what is the point of having the cake if not to eat it.

United’s pre-season form isn’t quite the only thing prompting this massive lack of humility. It’s all well and good to hump hapless teams across the pond in pre-season and increase the popularity of Soccerball, but we know those don’t really count. It’s also great that United finally got one past Barcelona, well mindful of the fact that it was really Barcelona ‘C’ at the Fedex field, and no one could really tell who the heck the blonde guy in the Baca No.2 jersey was. For me, the greatest ‘pre-season’ moment has to be the sex-on-the-football-pitch second goal in the Charity Shield, and the subsequent silencing of our noisy neighbours. The entire pre-season has been a foreplay of immense satisfaction. To be honest, most United fans right now are already thinking of leaning back contentedly on the bed in May, lighting the cigarette, looking down at the rest of the Premier League table and going ‘Was that good for you as well?’

It is not that the squad for this season is necessarily better, but you can see the signs. Rooney now has an incredibly mature head (hair transplant jokes aside) on those stocky Scouse shoulders. He runs attacks now instead of merely being at the end of them, and that has helped unlock much more of the total voetbal potential in him. For Nani, it looks to be shaping up to be one of those seasons at the end of which he will be sold to Real Madrid for some insane amount. Jones and Young are just the perfect additions we need, given that Valencia is out for a little while now and Rio is surely going to start lesser and lesser games as the season progresses. The ‘he’s like a new signing’ title has to go to Cleverley, hands down. The year of Premier League football in Wigan has done him a world of good, and his eager-puppy enthusiasm to run up and down the pitch, similar to the twins’, will do the team’s energy levels a world of good. All things considered, it’s still essentially the same core of a team that won the League by a clear 9 points last season, and everyone called that team ‘bad’.

The Future is Now

In keeping with season preview theme, this is the evaluate-your-opponents-with-a-clear-objective-view part. In keeping with the hubris theme, I’m not even going to bother withArsenal and Liverpool. I will admit I’m mildly concerned about Shitty’s ‘is this even legal?’ squad building excesses exercise. By sheer force of numbers, if you put 1500 decent players in a team, you are bound to settle on a 11 which is very good, and this brute force approach of City might actually work. The flipside is that it will take a while to hit this perfect 11, and hopefully by then Balotelli will be in jail, the season will be half-over and the middle east would have run out oil. In decreasing order of probability. Chelse too have gone ahead and brough a slew of… er… new coaching staff. Now I have immense respect for football at all levels, but there’s a reason that the two European-pedigree teams from the Portugese league competed the Europa Cup finals. AVB was great. In Portugal.

The goalkeeping issue is more a puzzle to me than a full-blown, hands-on-heads, double-differential-solving problem (yeah yeah, I did engineering, these analogies keep popping up in my head). All the pieces are in place, and it should just take a few games for De Gea or Lindegaard to fall in and complete the jigsaw. Personally, I wouldn’t worry if De Gea gets no games at all this season. In any profession, you get better with age, and at 20 he’s got plenty of that on his side. And heck, didn’t we all see Lindegaard in pre-season? After all the horror shows we had after Schmeichel left, Lindegaard will do just fine to fill a similar legend-retirement-hole, thank you.

United will kick off their title defence in about 12 hours from when this is published, and from that point all this will be tosh. So for one last time, I shall announce to all the footballing world loud and clear – I think we’re getting another pair of shiny new shoes in May after all…

PS: If you think you can manage a Premier League team better than Fergie, Arsene or Kenny, show us by joining the BFZ Fantasy League in the Premier League Fantasy Game. The League’s code is:1508310-327295