Lucky Night For Madrid In Manchester As Mourhino Admits United's Superiority

Despite taking an away goal back to Old Trafford, Sir Alex Ferguson’s men were still rated second favourites before welcoming Real Madrid. For the majority of a fascinating match, the hosts comprehensively proved the bookmakers wrong with a tactically perfect performance that threatened to turn talk of a treble into more than a pipe dream. Sir Alex had set his team up flawlessly to flummox Madrid. Fans were wide-eyed when news broke that Danny Welbeck had been preferred to Wayne Rooney but the decision to station the young forward directly against Xabi Alonso was inspired.

The United boss observed just before kick-off that the former Liverpool midfielder is the lynchpin of Los Blancos’ play and so it proved, with Welbeck stifling him so much that Madrid struggled to get any kind of service to homecoming king Cristiano Ronaldo.

Alonso was restricted to just 16 passes in the first half with an accuracy of 69 per cent as the hosts shut down their opponents with distinctly Mourinho-esque ruthlessness.

But the space opened up for both him and substitute Luka Modric when Welbeck was forced out to the left flank – a change enforced by Cuneyt Cakir’s decision to send Nani off. But the overwhelming reaction was shock at the harshness of the red card. It is hardly a rare occurrence for a player to trap a ball in midair with his foot, and Nani’s focus was squarely on his prize while Arbeloa careered in from outside his field of vision. The collision crunched but the full-back had hardly shied away from it; a yellow would surely have been more appropriate.

Lesser teams would have collapsed completely to the Madrid machine but United came back and were comfortably on top for the final 10 minutes. If it had not been for Diego Lopez’s improved second-half performance in the Spaniards’ goal, an even more extraordinary result could well have been theirs.

Welbeck, Giggs, Rafael, Nemanja Vidic, Nani … to a man, Sir Alex’s men were superb. Their exit feels like an injustice; it would have been fascinating to see how they coped in the latter stages after addressing many of their early-season criticisms. Now they can only focus on closing out a foregone Premier League conclusion and the secondary prize of the FA Cup, wondering what might have been.