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Van Gaal’s Experiment Continues

Manchester United posted a draw against West Bromich Albion this week…. by the skin of their teeth. The 2-2 result saw MU have to come back twice, the last in the closing minutes of regular time. Luckily, two players who hadn’t yet scored their first MU goals, decided to do it that night. Marouane Fellani who came on as a second half sub, scored a beautiful goal in the 48th minute to tie the game at 1-1 at that point. However, as we’ve seen too many times of late, the defense couldn’t keep the ball out of the net and we went down again, 2-1. Things were looking dire until Daley Blind scored the equalizer in the 87th minute. After regular time and 4 minutes of stoppage time, the result was a 2-2 draw.Marouane Fellaini

We haven’t seen too much of David Moyes’ 27.5 million pound man, Marouane Fellani, but he showed a bit of why Moyes wanted him that night. He left his man behind, chested down and finished a ball with a rocket shot over the goalie and into the net. WBA sent out a twitter before he came on, which caused a bit of controversy in the Twitter world.  The club tweeted: “Fellaini has now taken his tracksuit off, fortunately he has a Man Utd strip on underneath.” The humor was lost on me, as I guess it was for lots of others. Fellani had the last laugh.

Van Gaal said in his post game interview that he was happy with their style of play, but not happy with the result. I’m definitely watching more of a nail-biter than he is then. True there have been more moments of brilliant passing, energy, movement and attack; certainly over last year’s pedantic, lifeless efforts. However, they’re not consistent, and so, let the other team into the match. Van Gaal has yet to fix the defensive problems and experimented again by injecting Phil Jones returning from injury, along side Marcos Rojo and a somewhat lost Luke Shaw. The most consistent defender to date is Rafael who seems to play the defending/attacking style that van Gaal wants. Additionally, van Gaal started Ander Herrera over Antonio Valencia (why?) and that just didn’t work out. Januzaj got another chance to show what he can do, working up the left side, but added nothing.

And so it goes. The van Gaal experiment continues as we now face the big guns: Chelsea, Manchester City and Arsenal in the upcoming weeks. Wayne Rooney will be available to spark the side, and hopefully it’ll look a bit more like the team of old.

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