Football opinion

JOE looks back at Man U’s victory over Schalke, a game that will be remembered for the worst ever performance by a team in the semi-final of the Champions League.

By Tom Moss

Limp. Timid. Abject. Painfully boring. Utter bollocks. No no, we're not describing an evening alone with Ryan Tubridy, although those words would equally ring true if we were. Nope, those are just some of the words used to describe Schalke 04's farcical display against Man United last night.

'The Professor' Ralf Rangnick has a reputation for a methodical and studious approach to the game, but last night he flunked the test badly.

A home leg of a Champions League semi-final would traditionally entail some degree of attacking flair, a smidgeon of energy and determination to take a giant step towards securing the holy grail of professional club football, or at the very least showing even the slightest propensity to pass the half-way line with the football to give the sixty odd thousand fans something, anything, to shout about.

The Nutty Professor

But no, last night the apparently tough Germans were sent out to the slaughter by their apparently clever manager. 'The Professor' Ralf Rangnick has a reputation for a methodical and studious approach to the game, but last night he flunked the test badly.

It's hard to put his failure into context, but we can try. If a Leaving Cert student decided to experiment with LSD an hour before English Paper One, chopped his writing hand off with a blunt hatchet on his way in the school gates, stripped bollock naked and decided to doodle crude sketches of his exposed genitalia from several different angles for the entirety of the exam, he could hardly do worse than Rangnick did last night.

Sir Alex Ferguson takes the direct approach to transfer negotiations with Manuel Neuer

That might sound extreme, but those of you who watched the utter annihilation will understand where I'm coming from. Without the uber-impressive Manuel Neuer between the peppered Schalke goal, the 0-2 scoreline would have been considerably worse.

How so many of the Schalke supporters remained in Gelsenkirchen's Veltins Arena for the entire game was beyond me, such was the nature of the performance from the side who had somehow dismantled reigning champions Inter in the previous round.

Back to school

One commentator quipped that The Professor needs to go back to school. I'd suggest he goes even further back in his developmental process, because it was clearly flawed from the very start.

He's probably a tad big, and his mother perhaps a tad dead to go back to the very beginning, but I'm sure there is some excellent kindergartens in the region that would be delighted to take the 52-year old coach under their wing and attempt to reshape the mind of the clueless professor.

The upshot from the walk in the park means that Sir Alex will now be able to concentrate even closer on the two upcoming league fixtures against Arsenal and Chelsea. With Schalke looking about as dangerous as Shrewsbury Town, several key players might be given a night off for the return fixture, that is if Rangnick deems it worthwhile to even bother bringing his men to Manchester next Wednesday.

The Scott Parker Award for Good Performances in a Brutal Team: It looks as though his next move will be to Bayern Munich, but Manuel Neuer will have Sir Alex working overtime in order to scupper that potential deal.

With Edwin Van der Sar retiring, United have been scouring Europe for a replacement. United fans will remember the long list of butter-fingered flops that arrived on the scene after Peter Schmeichel moved on, and they won't want to see their like again. Neuer put in a one-man rescue mission to keep Schalke's slim hopes from being impossibility, and the giant German showed again last night why he is United's first choice target.

The Paul McShane Award for Disastrously Dodgy Defending: With over 50 international caps for the usually water-tight German national side, you'd expect Christoph Metzelder to possess even the most basic defensive qualities. The ability to put in a tackle, to head the ball out of the area, kick it more than ten yards, and at a stretch, find a member of your own team with a pass; it's not too much to ask surely?

Playing with a mask to protect a broken nose, the lumbering clown of a central defender played as if it was a blindfold. An awful performance in a team of awful performers.

Quote of the Day: 'He's pulling him off all night and he doesn't like it' - Tony Cascarino offers one explanation why Metzelder had problems in looking after Chicharito last night.