MANCHESTER UNITED’S manager has to take the blame for a team selection that effectively ended his side’s hopes of five trophies. The only form of defence was to win.

If Manchester United had safely navigated a route to the final then, over time, it would have been forgotten that Alex Ferguson jeopardised their hopes of securing a clean sweep of trophies by fielding such an experimental team.

Anything else and there would be a swarm of locusts heading in Ferguson’s direction.

United’s manager left Wembley insisting he had no regrets about his team selection and refusing to accept that he had made a rare error of judgment.

But this was the day the master plan fused and his strategy for winning an unprecedented five competitions was ripped up and tossed into the nearest waste-paper basket. The word “quintuple” can now disappear from the football lexicon as quickly as it arrived and, for that, it was difficult not to believe that some of the damage had been self-inflicted.

Perhaps, as Ferguson has repeatedly tried to tell us over the last few months, it was an impossible dream anyway. We should also recognise that Ferguson, as the most successful manager in the business, gets an awful lot more of his team selections right rather than wrong. But there is a difference between a calculated gamble and a reckless one, and Ferguson surely crossed the line here when he decided United could get away with playing four teenagers in his line-up and leaving out eight of his best 11 players.

We will never know what would have happened had United not left Cristiano Ronaldo, Ryan Giggs, Wayne Rooney et al in Manchester, and, of course, there was a certain logic to Ferguson’s argument that he had to think of the gruelling effects of the Champions League tie against FC Porto and preserve players such as Ronaldo for future assignments.

But an FA Cup semi-final at Wembley is surely not the time or place to experiment on such a grand scale.

United were laboured, slow to the ball and not decisive enough when they had possession. Federico Macheda, the Italian with the provisional driver’s licence and Midge Ure sideburns, showed some neat little flicks and an impressive eagerness to get on the ball. Daniel Welbeck, his strike partner, worked tirelessly, too.

Overall, though, Ferguson was asking too much to expect a forward line incorporating an 18-year-old and a 17-year-old to make up for the absence of Ronaldo and Rooney, two of the most penetrative front players on the planet. Welbeck’s runs were often into cul-de-sacs, while from Macheda there was little of the wow factor with which he had recently enjoyed.

It was certainly easy to imagine the scene in Everton’s dressingroom when the news came in that Ferguson had left his strongest side back in Manchester. When the two teams were read out, you could detect the gathering excitement among the Everton supporters and the first sense of foreboding from the opposite end of Wembley. If United’s fans have been monitoring Ferguson’s policy in the FA Cup this season, they might have expected some changes. Three, four, maybe even five. But not eight.

Wembley, after all, is a much different stadium to Moss Lane in Altrincham, where Ole Gunnar Solskjaer now takes charge of United’s reserve-team fixtures and supporters watch Welbeck and Macheda from the Carole Nash Main Stand. There were 591 people there last Thursday, when Welbeck was in Solskjaer’s team for a 2-0 win over Everton. This Thursday, Welbeck, a talented but raw striker, is likely to be involved again when Newcastle’s B-team make a visit to Cheshire.

Ferguson could argue that he nearly got away with it. He was impressed by the way his young players handled the occasion and, the master of the diversion technique, he was quick to divert any blame towards the referee, Mike Riley, for not giving his side a penalty after Phil Jagielka bumped Welbeck to the ground in the second half.

There have not been many more moments this season when Ferguson has been more em-purpled, and he was still bickering with the fourth official, Alan Wiley, long after the game had moved on. The surprise was that he did not jab out a finger at the Everton bench as well, because David Moyes, the victorious manager, had pulled off a classic Ferguson trick last week when he publicly questioned whether Riley, who has given nine penalties to United in 17 matches at Old Trafford, might be a closet supporter. He isn’t, of course, but if the intention was to plant a seed of doubt in Riley’s head and make him wary, even subconsciously, of awarding United a penalty in the semi-final, it worked a treat.

Ultimately, however, United's supporters will remember this as one of those rare days when Ferguson misjudged the delicate balance between resting players and fielding a team that is still strong enough to win. - GuardianService