Manchester United v Chelsea – crucial but no title-decider
How effectively Dimitar Berbatov can fill the hole created by the injury to Wayne Rooney could determine whether Manchester United win a record 19th title. Photograph: Andrew Yates/AFP/Getty Images
League championships are rarely settled by a decider between the leading contenders. An obvious exception was Arsenal's last-second goal at Anfield on a Friday evening in late May which snatched the title from Liverpool in 1989, but that game had been postponed following the Hillsborough disaster. It should have been played five weeks earlier.
Tomorrow's encounter between Manchester United and Chelsea has been billed as "possibly decisive" although it will not even be that. For while the Premier League trophy is almost certain to end up at Old Trafford or Stamford Bridge, Arsenal are by no means out of the running, and if the remainder of the season adheres to the pattern of the previous eight months there will be further fluctuations of form and more points dropped in unexpected circumstances to keep the plot boiling until the last.
At best tomorrow's game will provide an indicator of who is likely to emerge triumphant. United would regard beating Chelsea as the strongest evidence yet that they are on course to win a record 19th championship, not to mention an historic fourth successive title. Chelsea, on the other hand, would see the completion of a season's double over United as further proof of their renaissance under Carlo Ancelotti even if the team is approaching its sell-by date.
Either way, neither Ancelotti nor Sir Alex Ferguson is going to be left staring blankly into space at the final whistle as Liverpool's manager, Kenny Dalglish, did after Michael Thomas's goal had won the league for Arsenal 21 years ago. Ferguson has surely already suffered his worst moment of the week, in Munich on Tuesday when Wayne Rooney turned an ankle just as Ivica Olic was scoring Bayern Munich's winner in the first leg of the Champions League quarter-finals.
The fact that Rooney is going to be out for weeks rather than months may have been greeted with relief by England but is likely to be of small consolation for Manchester United, who now have to prove that Alan Shearer was wrong when he declared, in a radio interview, that the striker "has been carrying United on his own at times" and without him "they would not be where they are in the league".
Ferguson will now turn to Dimitar Berbatov, his second-highest scorer by some distance, to keep the momentum going at the top of the Premier League and turn the Champions League tie against Bayern around at Old Trafford on Wednesday. Berbatov's match-winning qualities are much subtler than Rooney's; he slips round to a side door whereas Rooney tends to crash through the front. It will be a bit like replacing Cannonball Kid with the Invisible Man.
The reality is that the whole United team, not just Berbatov, will need to do a bit more to make up for Rooney's enforced absence. The most startling aspect of Tuesday's defeat in Munich was the way Bayern, having been bowled over by Rooney's early strike, made a conscious decision to go for stealth rather than speed as they sought to save the game, concentrating on keeping possession and only quickening up near goal. This had the effect of exposing the shortcomings in midfield which, in the Premier League, United have managed to disguise for much of the time.
Manchester United are a team in transition, youth is on their side, whereas there is a touch of the old guard at dusk about Chelsea, who have a preponderance of players either in their late twenties or early thirties. For Chelsea, Didier Drogba is almost as much a talisman as Rooney is for United but they have stronger goal-scoring options and proved as much only last Saturday when they beat Aston Villa 7-1 with Drogba on the bench.
Whatever the result tomorrow the Premier League needs a match of superior quality to cherish and not just another series of grim clinches. It has been a non-vintage season domestically, the interest being sustained as much by the slip-ups as the successes. When the question of who comes fourth prompts as much discussion as who comes top then clearly something is lacking.
After the week's dramas in the Champions League tomorrow's game has some hard acts to follow. What a pity it has to kick off at 12.45pm. For some reason lunchtime matches produce few classics and this game should be occupying a prime spot on a Sunday, not sandwiched among the shoppers on a Saturday.
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