20/04/2009 12:00, Report by Stewart Gardner
How was the Wembley experience for you? Not great, was it?
United have now played five times at the “new” Wembley. There have been three goalless draws, four penalty shoot-outs and we’ve scored just one goal in normal play...
Yesterday’s semi final eventually finished just shy of seven o'clock in the evening. Ninety thousand people then faced the prospect of battling back to the North West of England, sitting in the clogged traffic around Wembley or shoehorning themselves onto a tube back to Euston. Many fans wouldn’t have got back home before the early hours. That makes life hard for people getting up for work this morning or kids going to school. The only conclusion I can come to is that the FA really aren’t that bothered about the problems faced by fans. I guess when you spend the best part of a billion pounds on a stadium you have to try and claw the cash back somehow.
Expensive tickets and ludicrously overpriced “food” are all part of the Wembley experience – I guess you’d expect that. But what is unforgivable is the state of the pitch. It’s been relayed five times since the stadium reopened in 2007. It’s going to be ripped up again in the summer. It was dry, spongy and cut up badly. Ridiculous. All of the fans that turned up on semi-final weekend surely deserved a lot better.
Still, I wouldn’t have been ranting like this if we’d won. Lots has already been said and written about the team selection. Certainly it was a bit of a shock but it so nearly worked. A United line-up containing four teenagers comfortably held the sixth best team in the Premier League. What an experience for the likes of Macheda, Welbeck and the da Silva twins.
But for a terrible decision by Mike Riley not to give United a
penalty it could have been so different - Welbeck was clearly brought down by Jagielka. Did Riley have David Moyes’ suggestion that he favoured United in his mind when he decided not to point to the spot? We’ll never know.
One man who certainly didn’t deserve to be on the losing side was Nemanja Vidic. An immense performance. Unbeatable at the back and deadly from the spot when the game ended with the great lottery of penalties – he was rightly man of the match.
I can’t begrudge the Everton fans their success. I was travelling with Paddy Crerand on the tube towards Wembley and we had some great banter with some of them. It's nice to find a set of supporters who dislike Liverpool as much as we do!
So, no more talk of the quintuple. But if we can defend the Premier League and Champions League this season, then yesterday’s events at Wembley will be very quickly forgotten.
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