No doubt United had let in two goals at Old Trafford, a worry given that away goals are always crucial in two legged cup ties, but Rooney's dramatic late winner at Old Trafford the previous week had given them a real boost. The first leg had served to accentuate the doubts over United's makeshift defence, but the optimists would argue that in United's case the best form of defence was attack. With Cristiano Ronaldo, Rooney, Giggs and co. in such sparkling form who would bet against this being enough?
However, if one were to look at things objectively, there was much less cause for optimism. To begin with, United's away record in Europe over the past few seasons has been abysmal. One of the few away victories that United had managed in the competition over the past two years was the 1-0 win at French minnows Lille in this year's round of 16. To accentuate this, United's record in Italy has also been very poor, the exception to which was their semifinal win at Juventus in 1999 when they went on to win the Champions League and complete the treble. There was no escaping the fact that the road to the final lay through Italy and that United's heroics at home in the second leg of the quarterfinal tie overshadowed the fact that they had been beaten 2-1 in Rome, and tactically outmaneuvered for much of that match.
But, at the very least, one would expect a close, hard fought match. This was, after all, the semi-finals of the premiere cup competition in the world. Instead, what we witnessed on a rain-soaked afternoon at the San Siro was nothing short of abject capitulation. For United fans, it was a form of pure agony.
Admittedly, I only woke up in time for the second half of the match. What I was greeted with was not encouraging. Kaka had managed to drill the ball into the bottom corner after a static United defence allowed Seedorf to head the ball on after only 11 minutes. Worse was to follow. Defending that would not have been out of place in a Monty Python sketch saw Heinze pass the ball to an unprepared and unsuspecting Vidic, who skied it towards the touchline where it fell invitingly for a Milan player to cross back into the box. The clearing header fell to Clarence Seedorf, the Dutchman evading a desperate lunge from the still befuddled Vidic before gleefully hammering the ball past his hapless countryman Van Der Sar in the United goal.
United fans could still take comfort from the fact that they had been faced with a similar situation before. In 1999 they were 2-0 down in Turin from two early Pippo Inzaghi goals and facing elimination unless they scored twice. That same Inzaghi was leading the Milan attacking line 8 years on. That was where the parallels ended. This was a different evening and this was clearly a different United side. Then, there was Roy Keane driving United forward and scoring a real captain's goal to initiate the fightback. His snarling determination and boundless energy had a parallel in 2007 - in the form of Milan's bulldog of a midfielder Gennaro Gattuso. In comparison, Keane's replacement in central midfield, Michael Carrick, wore a blank look of befuddled incomprehension for most of the match.
The real disappointment was not the fact that United lost, but the completely toothless way in which they capitulated to a Milan side that was vastly superior in almost every department. Milan were self-assured, passing the ball around with aplomb, closing down United effectively and giving Scholes, Carrick and Rooney hardly any time on the ball. As the match wore on, there seemed to be hardly a shred of self-belief in the United players, as they repeatedly passed the ball to their Milan opponents and ran aground against the solid brick wall that was the Milanese defence.
Cristiano Ronaldo, more than anyone else, was representative of United's performance as a whole. When faced with adversity, he regressed to some of the worst of his footballing excesses. The experienced Milan defenders were more than happy to watch him complete a half dozen step-overs before gleefully dispossessing him, Ronaldo having failed abjectly in his attempts to bamboozle them. As the frustration and desperation mounted, United found themselves playing more and more into Milan's hands. The Italians are renown at defending in depth and soaking up pressure, but there was hardly a need for a siege mentality on this occasion, mainly due to the fact that the United were firing blanks. Dida, the Milan custodian was hardly tested.
When the final nail in the coffin came, it was merely a microcosm of United's desperately poor defending across both legs and of Milan's gleeful opportunism in exploiting it. As yet another United attack was broken up with ease by the Milan defence, a ball was played over the top and Gilardino ran through an enormous crater in the United defence to calmly stroke the ball into the bottom corner.
A brief aside must be made at this point, with regards to the behaviour of the Milan team. Alex Ferguson had called for the game to be played in a spirit of fair play, no doubt bearing in mind the ugly incidents in Rome the previous month and further threats of violence from the right wing Italian ultras. There is no doubt that Milan's reputation for being a wily team is well deserved. Already clearly in the ascendancy, with the victory more or less secured, the Milan players engaged in needless time-wasting tactics. I have been a critic of the new change in the rules with regards to the referee being the arbitrator of stopping play in event of an injury to a player, but after seeing Milan players dropping like flies with "cramp" or other supposed ailments, I am forced to admit that there is some merit to FIFA's decision. I for one, can hardly blame United for failing to return the ball after yet another example of a Milan player putting it out of play to aid an "ailing" teammate, though it certainly raised the ire of a pent up Gattuso.
In the end, as United manager Sir Alex Ferguson readily admitted, it was Milan's vast experience on the big stage that made the vital difference between the two sides. Players like their rock solid centre backs Kaladze and Nesta, the midfield trio that dominated the game Gattuso, Pirlo and Seedorf and of course the peerless Kaka were all part of the 2003 Champions Cup winning team, not to mention the heartbreak of Istanbul in 2005 when they contrived to blow a 3-0 advantage against Liverpool. In comparison, Ronaldo, Carrick and much of the rest of the United team have never been in this kind of position and it showed. Milan's European pedigree is undisputed. United, barring the heroics of Barcelona in 1999, have too often fallen at this hurdle.
Roma had called for Milan to avenge them in this semi-final against United and to salvage Italian pride. They certainly did so at the San Siro this evening. The scoreline was perhaps not quite the humiliation that the 7-1 result at Old Trafford suffered by Roma was, but the nature of the display on the pitch certainly was. United had been out-thought, out-fought, and out-played. This brings up a intriguing repeat of the heroic Champion's League Final in 2005 and Liverpool's dramatic fightback, this time in Athens, not Istanbul. One looks forward in anticipation to a mouth-watering clash. Let us just hope that it won't be as one-sided and painful to watch as this night in Milan.
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