Schadenfreude filled the air at Old Trafford, where the only thing that they could find to shout about was Liverpool’s elimination from the Champions League the previous evening.
For Manchester United’s supporters, the Merseyside club’s travails are an obvious source of hilarity, the more so when their own team can afford to put their feet up, having secured their stuttering progression to the knockout stages a fortnight ago.
Football is a results business and United have had enough of them so far this season to be able to approach last night’s game as if it was a Carling Cup third-round tie and to shrug off the rare home defeat that followed for Sir Alex Ferguson’s young team.
They may be struggling to hit anything like top form, but United’s position is a source of envy not only to Liverpool, but to AC Milan, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Inter Milan, Bayern Munich and Juventus, all of whom go into the final round of group matches with their prospects in the balance.
Ferguson, the United manager, knew that his team had already qualified from group B, but when they visit Wolfsburg on December 8 first place will be up for grabs. That will be a handy position to be in, with Barcelona and Real potentially lying in wait for any runners-up.
Ferguson, though, claimed that he is not bothered. “I don’t think it makes a great deal of difference whether you win the group or not,” he said.
If it had, he would not have made as many as eight changes to the team who beat Everton 3-0 on Saturday and it is fair to suggest that he would have been more than “agitated”, as he put it, at the French referee’s baffling refusal to award United a penalty with four minutes left, when Patrice Evra was brought down by Ibrahim Kas.
However if United do come up against either of the Spanish giants in the last 16 then Ferguson may regret this defeat.
The Besiktas players basked in the glory of a result that allowed them to emulate the success of Fenerbahçe, their domestic rivals, in winning at Old Trafford by the same scoreline in 1996. As on that occasion, Ferguson’s team were beaten by a deflection, but it was nonetheless yet another goal that Ben Foster, United’s reserve goalkeeper, will feel that he could have done more to keep out.
Of the eight players that came into Ferguson’s team, none had more to prove than Foster, but that is a dangerous frame of mind for a goalkeeper to adopt. The position does not lend itself to point-proving, nor indeed to the levels of intensive scrutiny under which Foster seems to find himself every time he takes the pitch for United or, just as likely these days, for England. The left-foot shot from Rodrigo Tello in the twentieth minute was struck with venom and took a sizeable deflection off the head of Rafael Da Silva, who arguably should take the greater share of the blame for failing to close down the Besiktas player.
For all that, it looked to be a shot that Foster should have saved. He seemed to have reacted to the deflection well enough, but, whether out of a misjudgment or a nasty bounce, he failed to stop the shot. And how the Stretford End behind him groaned.
It was harsh on United’s youngsters, who had started brightly, with Darron Gibson, Danny Welbeck and Federico Macheda to the fore. All three would have expected to figure more prominently so far this season, and each showed glimpses of quality, suggesting that, even if they are too raw even to think about a regular first-team place, they are ready to answer Ferguson’s call when the need for freshness arises in the months ahead.
Macheda has not appeared in the Barclays Premier League this season, but a quicksilver run towards the penalty area in the eighteenth minute served as a reminder of his talent, even if his left-foot shot skidded wide.
Welbeck is similarly gifted with the ball and his pass set up Gabriel Obertan on the half-hour, but the French youngster shot at Rüstü Reçber, the veteran Besiktas goalkeeper.
Obertan is a strange one. There was a superb run early in the second half, as he danced between two challenges and struck a left-foot shot that Rüstü pushed around a post, yet the feeling persists that Ferguson’s biggest job will be on the mental side of the winger’s game. The case of the infuriating Nani shows that players cannot thrive on talent alone at Old Trafford. Still, United could and should have claimed something more from the game. After Evra was wrongly denied a penalty, Rüstü made two superb saves in stoppage time to keep out headers from Macheda and Wes Brown.
United’s young Turks had been frustrated by an old Turk, but, for the old Glaswegian in the dugout, this was one defeat that will go down as a learning experience.
Manchester United (4-4-2): B Foster — G Neville, W Brown, N Vidic, Rafael Da Silva (sub: P Evra, 74min) — G Obertan, D Gibson (sub: M Carrick, 73), Anderson, Park Ji Sung (sub: M Owen, 69) — F Macheda, D Welbeck. Substitutes not used: T Kuszczak, Nani, P Scholes, D Fletcher.
Besiktas (4-2-3-1): Rüstü Reçber — Ibrahim Kas, M Ferrari, Ibrahim Toraman (sub: Erhan Güven, 67), Ibrahim Üzülmez — M Fink, F Ernst — Ekrem Dag, R Tello (sub: Ugur Inceman, 75), Ismail Köybasi — Bobô (sub: Batuhan Karadeniz, 84). Substitutes not used: Korcan Çelikay, Rodrigo Tabata, Yusuf Simsek, Erkan Zengin. Booked: Batuhan Karadeniz, Rüstü.
Referee: S Lannoy (France).
Second guessing
•Manchester United have an incentive to top their Champions League group. As runners-up, they would meet one of five group winners — not Arsenal, Chelsea or the winners of their own section.
•That list would feature Bordeaux and could include Barcelona, Real Madrid, Seville and Lyons.
•Given the Spanish league’s apparent superiority over its Italian counterpart, United might prefer to face one of the runners-up, who will be Porto and possibly Juventus, AC Milan, Inter Milan, Fiorentina, Stuttgart and Olympiacos.
•If United lose their final group match away to Wolfsburg, they would still finish top if that defeat was by one goal and 3-2 or higher (thereby beating the German side on head-to-head), or if CSKA Moscow beat Besiktas (United would win a head-to-head mini-league with CSKA and Wolfsburg).MBT shoes Mbt Sport discount Mbt shoes Mbt m walk Mbt Lami
•By inflicting a first defeat on United in 25 European home games, Besiktas became the second Turkish team to end a lengthy unbeaten run at Old Trafford. United had never lost in 57 continental games at home spanning 40 years when Fenerbahçe won 1-0 in October 1996, below.
•Galatasaray, the other members of Turkey’s “big three”, also scored an away goals triumph in 1993 to destroy United’s hopes of a first appearance in the group stage.
•Only 22 goals were scored in 16 Champions League group matches this week — since the introduction of 16-game rounds in 1999-2000, the previous low had been 31.