ENGLISH PREMIER LEAGUE: West Ham Utd v Manchester Utd: DANIEL TAYLORon why Javier Hernandez is fast becoming Alex Ferguson's go-to striker at Old Trafford
WE ARE getting used to the smile, the index fingers pointing to the sky, the sense of potential blossoming into something far more serious and rewarding.
It was there again when Mexico beat Paraguay in the Oakland Coliseum last weekend: a stooping header, a right-foot finish, two more goals and the adulation of the crowd. Then on to San Diego for a friendly against Venezuela and this time Javier Hernandez was unable to score. It felt like the news itself. “Hernandez could not find the back of the net”, read one match report. All that was missing was the exclamation mark.
Back in Manchester, Dimitar Berbatov was quietly going about his business, the daily grind of training, preparing for today’s game at West Ham, quite possibly wondering whether he is being ushered to the edges in a season that at one point had cast him in the leading role.
Hernandez has played instead of Berbatov in five of Manchester United’s past six matches. So far, Hernandez has 16 goals in 34 games (18 starts). In the Premier League he has 10 from 14 shots on target. For Mexico, 14 in 23 caps. Ask Alex Ferguson about the player’s development and he will glow with a rare pride. “It’s been nothing but acceleration,” he said this week of a 22-year-old who, at €6.8 million, has legitimate credentials to be considered the season’s outstanding piece of transfer business.
For Berbatov, it represents a challenging period. The Bulgarian could conceivably return to the team at Upton Park today but, if so, two things will have to be taken into account. One is that Hernandez is simply being rested after a hectic fortnight of travelling through different time zones. The second is that there is hard evidence to deduce a clear change in Ferguson’s thinking and that Berbatov has dropped to third in the list of United strikers when earlier in the season he had established himself ahead of Wayne Rooney as number one.
On the face of it, Berbatov is entitled to wonder what he has done wrong, given his partnership with Rooney has a better strike rate (a goal every 52 minutes) than Rooney’s with Hernandez (one every 71 minutes).
This has been Berbatov’s most productive season for the club by some distance, with 21 goals so far compared to 12 and 14 in the previous two years. He is the first United player to score a hat-trick against Liverpool since 1946 and the first to manage three hat-tricks in a season since Ruud van Nistelrooy in 2002-03.
Rooney was asked this week to nominate United’s player of the year and instinctively replied: “Berba.” Yet there remains the unmistakable sense that Ferguson does not trust him implicitly.
This is not to denigrate Berbatov’s improvement from the man whose talent was too often muzzled in his sometimes beguiling, sometimes bewildering first two seasons at Old Trafford, but this is still a player who can perplex.
Eleven of Berbatov’s goals have come in three matches. In between the three against Liverpool in September and the five against Blackburn Rovers in November it sums up the Berbatov enigma there was a 69-day run when he did not score in 10 games.
Ferguson has described him as a “genius” this season but he has also publicly expressed dissatisfaction with the disparity between the player’s performances home and away. All but four of Berbatov’s 20 league goals have been scored at Old Trafford, and a direct correlation can be made with the team’s results. The home record is formidable, with a mere two points dropped all season, whereas United have won only four away games.
The problem for Berbatov is that a trend has developed and it is this: when the heat of the battle is dangerously close to intolerable, Ferguson tends to look elsewhere. Berbatov was not in the team against Chelsea. Nor the league and cup games against Arsenal. He was on the bench when Manchester City came to Old Trafford. Indeed, Berbatov has started only 23 out of 48 “big” games since joining the club – “big” meaning finals and semi-finals, league matches against Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur and City, plus the Club World Cup and Champions League knockout ties.
Then consider the 30-year-old’s record in Europe, 18 games and two and a half years since he last scored. Somewhere along the line Ferguson appears to have lost a degree of trust in the €35m man. In last season’s quarter-final against Bayern Munich, with Rooney off the pitch and United needing a goal to stay in the competition, Ferguson preferred to use a winger, Nani, in the centre forward’s role, while the most expensive player in the club’s history sat on the bench.
An argument could be made that there is a big difference between the Berbatov of now and then, particularly when thinking back to the almost broken body-language – shoulders sagged, head down, hands on hips – in the 0-0 draw at Ewood Park last April.
Not too much should be read into the fact United are yet to extend a contract that expires in 14 months. The club have a “one-way option” to add another year and there is no reason to believe it will not happen.
Nonetheless, Hernandez’s emergence is threatening to have ramifications for Berbatov if we can safely assume that Rooney, perhaps fortunately, is to remain a mandatory first-team pick.
Gary Neville likened Hernandez this week to Ole Gunnar Solskjaer but it was not only the player’s attributes in the penalty area to which he was referring. Neville noted how Hernandez always chases down the opposition goalkeeper and defenders when he does not have the ball. “When you get a player who is willing to work like that, it lifts the whole stadium.”
Ferguson has also used the Solskjaer comparison and the manager’s eyes sparkled this week when he recollected Hernandez’s scoring debut against an MLS All-Star side in Houston last summer.
After the game Paul Scholes turned to Ferguson, nodded and registered his approval with one simple sentence: “He’ll get us 25 goals.” As Ferguson says: “Paul Scholes doesn’t say a lot, but he’s a fantastic judge.”
Guardian Service
