Four Reds Shine In Dominant Display

To achieve success in the Champions League, your big-game players must perform and that was certainly the case for Manchester United during Wednesday’s 4-1 win at CSKA Moscow.

Yes, the Reds won in Russia because of a powerful and dominant team display, but there were a number of individual performances that were potent enough to strike fear into the minds of future opponents.

Romelu Lukaku, signed from Everton in July, enhanced his burgeoning reputation on the elite stage by scoring his ninth and 10th goals for the club. Considering the Belgian has only made nine appearances in all competitions, he already looks like a bargain at a reported fee of £75million.

The fact that Lukaku finished with his very first touch of the ball, a downward header from close range on four minutes, also emphasised his increasingly-impressive prowess inside the penalty area. His second effort did that too, after he capitalised on a defensive error to slot home from yards out.

There are traits of Ruud van Nistelrooy in the way that he consistently nets simple, clinical and vital goals, but it is still too early to truly compare him with the great Dutchman of 150 finishes.

A striker of Lukaku’s quality is a genuine gift, however a winning side always requires somebody at the other end of the pitch to prevent goals from going in and United have the world’s finest goalkeeper in David De Gea. His one-handed save to deny Alan Dzagoev shortly after Romelu’s opener was stunning and it crucially prevented CSKA from equalising straightaway, which would have encouraged their intimidatingly-excellent fans at the newly-built, 30,000-seat VEB Arena.

Later in the first half, the Spaniard produced another excellent stop to frustrate Fedor Chalov, leaving this writer in wonder at why he was omitted from FIFA’s recent three-man shortlist for their Goalkeeper of the Year award. Those who watch him week in, week out, will surely agree with that opinion.

Elsewhere in Moscow, Anthony Martial was unquestionably magnificent up front, ghosting past markers with frightening ease, providing both of the crosses that led to Lukaku’s first-half goals, calmly slotting home his penalty and hitting the shot that led to Henrikh Mkhitaryan netting on the rebound.

That added up to another wholly influential performance from Martial that showed Jose Mourinho was right to start him in Russia ahead of his eventual second-half replacement Marcus Rashford.

Then there was of course Mkhitaryan, who lived up to his reputation as a master of European football by scoring an opportunistic second-half goal, adding to his impressive tally of continental strikes – last season he netted at Zorya Luhansk, Saint-Etienne, FC Rostov, Anderlecht and against AFC Ajax in Sweden.

Crucially, Wednesday’s win has put United firmly in control of Group A on six points after FC Basel secured a comfortable home win over Benfica. The Portuguese side are our next opponents in an anticipated double-header that coincidentally occurs 50 seasons on from our 1968 European Cup final win at Wembley. Should we beat them twice, qualification to the last 16 would surely be guaranteed.

The knockout stages of the Champions League are then an unpredictable affair and it remains to be seen how far United can progress in the competition this season. But with so many big-name players producing, as part of an effective team display, fans can rightly feel optimistic about the campaign to come.