Valencia spreads his wings to stir memories of Stanley Matth
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Antonio Valencia's partnership with Wayne Rooney is bringing rewards and the winger crossed for the striker's winning header against Aston Villa. Photograph: Eddie Keogh/Reuters
A right-winger starring in a Wembley showdown will always carry a special resonance, and in the week when Stanley Matthews's boots from the 1953 FA Cup final were auctioned for £38,400, more than five times their estimate, it was particularly fitting that Luis Antonio Valencia Mosquera should shape the outcome of yesterday's match.
Aston Villa had been giving their supporters no shortage of encouragement as the 50th League Cup final went into its last quarter. But with a strong run and a precise cross, Valencia gave Wayne Rooney the opportunity to put the finishing touch to the goalscoring combination that has given Manchester United a new impetus as the season enters its decisive phase.
Bought by Sir Alex Ferguson from Wigan Athletic for £16m last summer, Valencia had a relatively quiet start to his United career. In the past fortnight, however, the 24-year-old Ecuadorian has produced performances evoking the club's list of specialist wingmen over the past half-century, from John Aston to David Beckham.
In the first leg of United's European Cup tie against Milan at San Siro two weeks ago Valencia came on to replace the erratic Nani midway through the second half, with the match tied at a goal apiece. Within a minute he had provided the cross from which Rooney headed the ball back across Dida to give the English club the lead. And at Old Trafford against West Ham last Tuesday there were two more Valencia crosses and two more Rooney headers to provide the first two goals in a 3-0 win.
Wingers are nowadays generally expected to do more than lurk on their favoured flank, waiting for the ball that will give them the opportunity to run at the full-back. Such behaviour is usually dismissed as self-indulgent and wasteful; players who would once have hugged the touchline are encouraged to follow the example of Cristiano Ronaldo, Valencia's predecessor at Old Trafford, roaming across the width of the field and resisting classification as well as marking.
Who started the fashion of switching wide players to the opposite flank? Perhaps it was Arsène Wenger, first with Robert Pires and then, even more successfully, with Thierry Henry, who brought the art of using right-footed skills on the left flank – think of all those sidefooted shots curling around the goalkeeper and inside the far post – to a high level. At Barcelona, Frank Rijkaard used the left-footed Lionel Messi on the right side and Ronaldinho, who favours his right, on the left, the idea being that when the forward cuts inside, the opposing full-back is always being challenged on his weaker side.
As we saw yesterday, Martin O'Neill has been mixing and matching both approaches with his Aston Villa wingers. Stewart Downing and Ashley Young, who favour their left and right feet respectively, started the match in the conventional stations but had switched flanks within a couple of minutes, and kept switching in an effort to keep United's full-backs permanently off balance. Both forwards are exciting players and at times the tactic looked like working, particularly with the neat James Milner and the sage Emile Heskey calmly organising the distribution.
Sometimes, however, there is no substitute for letting a specialist do what he does, without trying to complicate things. Valencia is not being asked to do much more than destroy defences on his natural side of the pitch, and when he sent over the cross that hung in the air to await the application of Rooney's forehead, it could have been Matthews supplying Stan Mortensen in that classic encounter between Blackpool and Bolton.
A gifted winger who goes about his business with a sense of focus and economy can be a priceless asset. Alert English fans have known about Valencia since 2006, when he played against Sven-Goran Eriksson's team in the first knockout stage of the World Cup, a match in which England laboured to a 1-0 victory. His three seasons with Wigan, two of them on loan from Villarreal, created a good impression, not least on Ferguson. And if he was bought to replace Ronaldo, it was not to keep up the quota of stepovers and pouts.
The Ecuadorian may not possess the technical originality of his Portuguese predecessor, and his goalscoring contribution – he has six this season – is unlikely to match that of Ronaldo. But he has genuine pace and a cool head, and if he can keep getting behind his marker and directing his crosses to make the most of Rooney's timing, positioning and aerial power, then he will have given his side a weapon that is both reliable, thanks to its essential simplicity, and, as we saw when Rooney hit the Villa woodwork from a second Valencia cross four minutes after the goal, extremely difficult to counter.