When you think of counter-attacking football, you may well think of Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United, who as good as perfected the act in the late 2000s.
The legendary Scot was always known for his insistence on elite level strikers to finish off devastating passages of play, and he had one of his most lethal groups of forwards to do so.
In the 2006/07 season, with United trying to wrestle back the Premier League after three years without it, they had Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo both becoming certified megastars.
The pair would end up joint top-scorers for the Red Devils with 23 goals apiece as they took back the English top flight crown and sent a warning to the rest of Europe.
They did so with Ferguson’s trademark counter-attacking style, something that was incapsulated at home to Bolton in March 2007.
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“Even though people say our United team had all these great players, in reality our biggest strength was as a pure counter-attacking machine,” Rooney would later recall. “We would sit back in our shape, win the ball and just go.
“We trained counter-attacking from one goal to the other. In the drill we had eight seconds to score. We put a striker on the halfway line and two players on either side of the goalposts.
“One would play the ball up to the striker and both would sprint to join him. With two defenders against you, you had eight seconds to score.”
That training drill was displayed to perfection in the 4-1 win, with Ronaldo collecting a failed throw-in outside the box, shifting it to Rooney, collecting it again and then sprinting the length of the pitch to play it back for the Englishman to dink in.
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The move was so good that it won the Premier League’s Goal of the Season award, an honour normally the property of long range wonder strikes, showing just how perfect it was.
The following season, with the addition of Carlos Tevez, United would add their another league title and their third Champions League, with Ronaldo pummelling in a club record 42 goals.
And in his final campaign before heading to Real Madrid, in 2008/09, him and Rooney were again linking up in devastating fashion, this time in Europe.
After topping their group with 10 points from 12, the reigning European champions went through Inter Milan and Porto to set up a semi-final tie with Arsenal.
It was the first meeting between the two Premier League giants in the competition, and after a 1-0 win at Old Trafford thanks to John O´Shea, it was all to play for at the Emirates.
That feeling didn’t last for long, though, as Ji-Sung Park put the Red Devils ahead in the eighth minute, and then it was two courtesy of Ronaldo in the 11th with an outrageous free-kick not far from the half-way line.
Then in the second half came the goal of goals. Bacary Sagna whipped a hopeful cross into the box, and when Nemanja Vidic headed clear, the drill began.
Ronaldo flicked the ball back to Park, and set off at full pelt down the right-hand side, with Rooney doing the same on the left.
Park played the ball forward to Rooney, who carried it and then laid it on a plate for Ronaldo to slam in a goal that completely ended Arsenal’s hopes.
The time it took from Vidic’s header to Ronaldo’s goal? Almost exactly eight seconds.
News Summary:
- ‘Eight seconds to score’ – Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo combined for goal of the season after being drilled into counter-attacking machine
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