Arvind Ashok: Fitness & Nutrition Simplified

About two sum­mers ago, I blogged that United needed to buy Ribery. Instead, we ended up buy­ing Nani. I never under­stood the logic of that. Coz they both ended up cost­ing approx­i­mately the same amount. But on one hand, you had the fin­ished arti­cle in Ribery. On the other, you had poten­tial — another Ronaldo maybe. But why buy poten­tial at that moment for that steep a price?! Espe­cially when buy­ing Ribery would’ve meant Ben­zema might’ve been tempted! Ignor­ing Tor­res was another mis­take that SAF made (so did I!) but that is sorta accept­able because that could’ve gone either way. Just look at Jose Reyes etc.
Apart from the 80 mil­lion pound irre­placa­ble hole, United has a bunch of places that need fill­ing. So, who does Fer­gie buy this Jan, or this sum­mer?
First and fore­most, Marek Ham­sik. We need to replace Scholesy, one of the best cen­tral mid­field­ers of his gen­er­a­tion. And from the lit­tle of Ham­sik I’ve seen and the hype oth­ers have cre­ated, I think he is the guy! An attack­ing mid­fielder and play­maker, capa­ble of surg­ing runs. With Har­g­reaves, Fletch and Ander­son, think our cen­tral mid­field will be very capa­ble with the addi­tion of Ham­sik.
Sec­ond, the wings. We need to dis­pose of Nani and Tosic. Even though I’ve not seen Tosic play, it is obvi­ous he is not good enough if he has not started in almost a year. Angel Di Maria is an (expen­sive) option. But there are other options as well — Mesut Ozil or Juan Manuel Mata. Maybe even David Silva. But we def­i­nitely need one solid winger down the left-hand side. Ober­tan and Park are good back-ups.
Third, up front. We need to play around Berba­tov and Rooney. Like we played around Ronaldo the last two sea­sons, the gaffer needs to struc­ture the for­ma­tion so Berba­tov can do his magic. No sign­ings are needed here as we have two great prospects in Macheda and Well­beck. We just need to extract the best out of Dimi and Wazza.
Fourth, in cen­tral defense, we need another young centre-back. Giv­ing up Pique was nec­es­sary as I felt Fer­gie was lim­it­ing his poten­tial. And boy has he improved since going to Barca! In fact, he might develop into a fine libero. Fancy that! Any­ways, we need a solid 19 year old to pro­vide backup.
Full backs, prob­a­bly the only posi­tion we will not need strength­en­ing in a while.
Finally, the goal­keeper conun­drum. The eas­i­est thing would be to buy Igor Akin­feev. But I think in Tomasz Kuczsak, we have our future #1. Ben Fos­ter, am not so sure about. But Fergie’s blind faith in him might ham­per this sit­u­a­tion and lead to Tomasz leav­ing, Fos­ter fail­ing and us even­tu­ally buy­ing Akin­feev.
Over­all, I think we are two peo­ple short of a great team and of course, a for­ma­tion and style of play to extract the best from Berba­tov and Rooney. So, here’s to buy­ing Ham­sik and a left winger. And Glory Glory Man United!