ENGLISH PREMIER LEAGUE:Manchester Utd 2 Sunderland 2:THE GREAT shame was that Alex Ferguson's extraordinary allegation about the referee Alan Wiley allegedly time-wasting because he was "unfit" and "needed a rest" was such a powerful and skilfully executed diversion technique it dragged attention away from a Sunderland performance that smacked of a club in the process of being reinvented.
Until that point it had been a story of Sunderland demonstrating every quality that is necessary, apart from good fortune, for a visiting team to succeed at Old Trafford and of a Manchester United side that looked so laboured and flat it felt as if they had misplaced their own identity.
Then, like a conjuror, Ferguson misdirected his audience. The newspapers had their story and the focus was shifted. The United manager has admitted in the past there have been times when he has offered a juicy diversion to the media to distract attention from a bad performance.
In this case he was being asked about Sunderland’s second goal and his assessment of the desperately out-of-form Ben Foster.
“I will have to look at it again. It was a soft goal for us to lose, whatever happened.” A pause, and then the switch flicked inside his head. “Anyway we got back and I was disappointed with the referee. He didn’t add on any time for the goal we scored. He played four minutes and two seconds’ injury time. There should have been another 30 seconds. But he was walking up the pitch after the goal, needing a rest. He just wasn’t fit enough for a game of that stature. The fitness of both [sets of] players, the pace of the game, demanded a referee who was fit. But he’s not fit. I don’t think he’s fit.
“It’s an indictment of our game that we see referees from abroad who are as fit as butcher’s dogs. We’ve got some good referees in our country who are fit. But he [Wiley] wasn’t fit. He was taking 30 seconds to book a player; he was taking a rest . . . writing down the names on his card and taking 30 seconds for a booking, it’s ridiculous.”
However, Ferguson may have talked himself into trouble with the Football Association as the FA is distinctly unimpressed with his remarks after writing to every Premier League manager at the start of the season to instruct them not to comment about match officials.
The attention though was expertly moved away from United’s shortcomings and Foster’s implosion since taking over from the injured Edwin van der Sar.
Coming into this game, Foster had been responsible or partly to blame for three of the six league goals United had conceded. A defence could be made that Darren Bent’s seventh-minute goal was struck with such power the goalkeeper should be absolved. Later, when he jumped timidly at a ball he should have been claiming, allowing the braver Kenwyne Jones to make it 2-1, the most damning assessment was that it no longer felt like an abnormality. Foster had become a danger to his own team.
But it would be unfair to dwell too much on United’s failures and overlook what had put them on their knees in the first place.
“Everyone will say United were poor but it was our performance that made them poor,” Bruce remarked – so poor that Paul Scholes could not even make a 10-yard pass. Ferguson’s decision to rest Ryan Giggs despite the following two-week break for internationals looked strange. No explanation was offered, nor for the omission of Rio Ferdinand.
United kept going. It is a special quality and, briefly, it looked as if they could manufacture a third goal once Anton Ferdinand had diverted Patrice Evra’s shot into his own net. That was two minutes into Wiley’s four minutes of stoppage time and, for the previous seven minutes, Sunderland had been a man down because of Kieran Richardson, booked for a first-half body-check, kicking the ball away at a free-kick.
Until that point, United had looked short of ways to add to the slicing volley with which Dimitar Berbatov drew them level six minutes into the second half. One can only hope Richardson had the decency to apologise to sturdy competitors such as Michael Turner, Lee Cattermole and Lorik Cana, and clever players such as Andy Reid and Steed Malbranque, who had brought Sunderland to the verge of their first victory at Old Trafford since 1968.
Guardian Service
Bent 7 Jones 58 Sent off:Richardson (85)
