Goals for and Against

Van GaalDanny Welbeck scored his first senior hat trick in the Champion’s League with Arsenal and promptly hit back at Louis van Gaal’s insistence on playing him on the wing. The decision to sell him for £16Million to the Gunners is now looking like the bargain of the season for Wenger.

Goals are not in short supply, 13 in the league but clean sheets certainly are with 10 goals conceded so far. The nearest team with 10 gaols in the against column is West Ham in tenth place.

Chelsea will be hard to stop with 21 goals in the bag so far and no defeats. So much for my preseason predictions!  I gave Chelsea only an outside chance of the title. To be fair, some readers challenged me on that one and they were right to do so. Chelsea have been the team to beat so far and many people begrudge them success because they don’t like the managers arrogance. JM brings with him some swagger and confidence but having him in the English Premier League can only be a good thing! Certainly, press conferences would be less interesting without him.

Returning to my point about Danny Welbeck’s hat trick for Arsenal in the Champions League, he didn’t score hugely for United and one hat trick does not make for a super striker. However, if anyone has watched him play for the Gunners they will see a player playing with confidence in his favoured forward role. Why then, if he is so prolific up front, was he played so often on the wing?

Obviously Van Gaal is not obliged to answer my impertinent questions; but if Welbeck continues to impress then the decision to sell him to a rival team would look foolish, at best. That said, he will look like a genius if (in a few years) Welbeck is playing for Rotherham or turning out for an up and coming Chinese team which appears to the fashion at the moment.

So, United are a striker down and falling rapidly behind Chelsea in the goal scored column. What now for Van Gaal’s Red Devils? The team are up to fourth place in the table and have only lost 2 games, not quite the disaster that some have been talking about.

Hang on; it was me only last week commenting after the Leicester loss that the Dutchman was overseeing a worse season than David Moyes. Let me conveniently forget about that and wave my little United flag furiously.

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