The Community Shield delivered exactly what every ManU fan expected: a win against Chelsea.
Sadly our trophy win wasn’t as exciting as we’d have loved it to be, but penalties decided the tie.

ManU dominated the first half, with fast football in the midfield and a well organized position game. The Chelsea midfield was almost invisible during all of the first 45 minutes and the Reds ruled. Chelsea hardly created any chance, actually they hardly created any good midfield combination. We covered the whole midfield and except two breakthrough chances Chelsea was rather invisible. During the first 30 minutes our best man definitely was Patrice Evra, and it was him in the 34rd minute who, after a quick 1-2 with Ronaldo, delivered the decisive assist on Giggs left foot. Giggs terminated without hesitating in the right upper corner. View Giggs’ goal here.

For the next 10 minutes ManU continued to control the midfield, but a brilliant pass of Ashley Cole launched Malouda who scored, after arguably having pulled down Rio Ferdinand. 1-1 Was the score when both teams left the pitch.

After the break Chelsea became more prominent in the game, but not because they controlled more, rather because the number of bad passes by ManU started to accumulate. Ronaldo’s chance in the early minutes of the second half, brilliantly saved by Chech, was not representative of our game at all.
Even after Mikael Silvestre was changed for Nani, ManU couldn’t really take advantage of the game.
ManU slightly kept control of the game, but mostly because of the weak performance of Chelsea.

The scoreboard locked at 1-1 after 90 minutes lead to penalties and this would become the moment of one of the most questioned players lately: Edwin Van Der Sar.
Edwin saved the first three Chelsea penalties, taken resp. by Pizarro, Lampard and Shaun Wright-Philips. Rio Ferdinand and Michael Carrick both converted perfectly, leaving the honours of scoring the decisive penalty to Wayne Rooney.

Chelsea V Manchester United Community shield 2007 penalties

Even though Jose could once more realize how little a club Chelsea is, today’s game learned us that there still is a long way to go and we still have to improve on almost every line. Defense, midfield and even the attack will have to work lots to integrate Carlos Tevez’s style in our game. Nothing is won yet, but it all looks great so far.

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