COMMUNITY SHIELD FINAL Manchester Utd v Portsmouth:WHATEVER ELSE is said about tomorrow's Community Shield match no one will call it a showcase. The goods on display are not objects of fascination.
Peter Crouch is the single major signing by either team and with all due regard to the forward, who has returned to Fratton Park after a six-year absence, he cannot be classified as exotica. Manchester United, for the time being at least, can live contentedly with the squad that won the Premier League and Champions League, several of whom are injured or ill at present.
The transfer market has usually been a promotional device, whipping up interest and season-ticket sales. But not this summer. Without splurges at Sunderland, Fulham and Tottenham there would be redundancies for the office staff who register footballers. The current state of affairs must be disorientating for a wheeler-dealer such as Harry Redknapp, who might now be buttonholing passers-by to reminisce about January 2006, when he bought almost a team's worth of players and sold nearly as many.
Even last season there were overtones of perpetual revolution. Of the line-up that won the FA Cup final three months ago, Sylvain Distin, Hermann Hreidarsson, John Utaka, Sulley Muntari and Lassana Diarra were all in their first season at the club.
Inter's offer of €16 million for Muntari was too generous to reject, but Redknapp more or less has the squad that kept Portsmouth in the top half of the table. Although he would have preferred an upgrade, the team is not in desperate need of reshaping.
Redknapp will be unhappy that a global credit crunch has found its way to Fratton Park and it is understandable that he wants a younger centre-half on the books, even if the attempt to sign Younes Kaboul from Tottenham appears to have gone into suspended animation. He should not expect condolences from his peers around the country. The Portsmouth manager will be considered fortunate by other managers since plenty of progress was made by Redknapp while the fiscal going was still good. In the January transfer window, for instance, Jermain Defoe came from White Hart Lane at the realistic and highly affordable price of €9.5 million. He may not contribute enough to the match as a whole, but the striker does score. Starting with an equaliser on his debut against Chelsea he scored eight goals in a dozen Premier League appearances for Portsmouth.
The transfer window does not close until the end of this month and frenetic trading could be conducted before then, but United have not been in the thick of the marketplace. There has been nothing yet to whet the appetite of supporters, but they have no cause to be bored, not after the retention of the Premier League and the return to Old Trafford of the European Cup.
A rueful United will also reflect that they spent a lot of money without making any impact whatsoever. Carlos Tevez was already perceived as a United player so the cost of turning the loan of the West Ham player into a permanent transfer hardly registered with the public.
Ferguson's aim, temporarily at least, is to set an entirely familiar group of footballers in the direction of a third consecutive title. So imposing is the squad that the manager is taxed to improve on it.
United could do with a centre-forward and the lone-striker system employed to such effect may have reflected limitations as well as tactical planning. It makes perfect sense, in that context, to believe that efforts to take Dimitar Berbatov from Tottenham will intensify soon.
There is a slight awkwardness for United. They must wonder whether Cristiano Ronaldo can conceivably have consecutive seasons at so productive a level. No immediate answer will come either to the question of whether he will go on being absorbed by life at United. The assertions of commitment come far too long after the start of the furore over the possible switch to Real Madrid. As if that did not suffice, Ferguson is yet to learn how much time it will take for the Portuguese to regain fitness following knee surgery.
On top of that, transition has to be controlled as United scale down their dependence on the veterans Gary Neville and Ryan Giggs. The goalkeeper Edwin van der Sar, 38 in October, also intends this to be his last campaign at Old Trafford.
The sides may seem stable tomorrow, but change, in the end, is an inevitability rather than an option.
Guardian Service
