A couple of minor demons were put to flight in Gelsenkirchen.
Wayne Rooney, who made the first of Manchester
United's goals and scored the second, will no longer be
required to think of the Veltins Arena as the place where his
dismissal prefaced England's exit from the 2006 World Cup.
Meanwhile his manager was taking a big step towards ending a run of
defeats at the hands of German teams – Borussia Dortmund, Bayer
Leverkusen, Bayern Munich – for United under his command in
two-legged Champions
League knockout rounds.
For Rooney this was a particularly satisfying night. Having
spent the morning, according to his Twitter message, in his hotel
room listening to the Beatles, he produced a display good enough to
expunge the memory of the doleful figure who stumbled through the
World Cup last summer and took months to emerge from some sort of
personal slough of despond.
The arrival of Javier Hernández as an attacking partner seems to
have reawakened the enthusiasm formerly aroused by the presence of
Cristiano Ronaldo and Carlos Tevez. Once again Rooney is playing
with optimism, as though anything is possible any time he has the
ball. The return of Antonio Valencia may be another contributory
factor, the Ecuadorian here providing United with a series of
threatening raids that encouraged the forwards to make answering
runs.
United made enough chances to have widened the margin
considerably against a side whose coherence never came close to
matching their spirit. You do not go away from home in the
semi-final of the European Cup and expect to enjoy two-thirds of
the possession and perhaps 90% of the chances. Come the end of the
second leg at Old Trafford next Wednesday, however, it is unlikely
that they will be rueing the number of opportunities they spurned
here.
Rooney, Ryan Giggs, Fábio da Silva, Park Ji-sung and Michael
Carrick might all have lit up the scoreboard in the first half. But
the best chances fell to Hernández, who found an impenetrable foe
in Manuel Neuer, Schalke's hero
of the night.
The 22-year-old Mexican was quickly into his stride, darting
through the Schalke defence with his increasingly familiar blend of
persistence and a perceptive eye for fissures in the opposing
defence. In the sixth minute he pulled away from his marker at the
far post to meet a low, curling centre from Valencia with a shot
saved by Neuer. Then he was scampering through to meet Park's
prodded pass, only for Neuer to smother a shot from a difficult
angle.
Sir Alex Ferguson bought Hernández in the summer but did not
expect him to settle in so quickly. Before this match he had made
40 appearances in all competitions and scored 19 goals, a rate of
return that has delighted not only his new manager but also
United's support, responsive to his transparent eagerness.
Hernández is a terrific goal-snatcher, a prodigy in the mould of
Michael Owen, who travelled with United's squad but was not even
named among the substitutes here, and of Raúl González, once the
prodigy of all prodigies at Real Madrid, who led Schalke's line for
this match without reward.
Of their generation, born in the 1970s, Raúl, Owen and Filippo
Inzaghi were the most lethal predators, all three with a gift for
timing their sprints to confound the shrewdest defensive trap.
Ferguson, who once admiringly joked that Inzaghi must have been
"born offside", nurtures a particular affection for the breed, and
now he has captured what looks very much like the latest example,
similar in build and with an identical aim in life.
Here, given considerable responsibility alongside Rooney,
Hernández was able to show other dimensions of his play as he held
the ball up in the centre under pressure from Schalke's burly
centre‑backs, Joël Matip and Christoph Metzelder, made occasional
forays to the flanks and searched constantly for opportunities to
create combinations with his attacking partner. From their
different vantage points both Owen and Raúl must have been watching
Hernández with a nostalgic ache as he fought a personal duel with
the remarkable Neuer, who left the field at half-time to the sound
of an ovation from the home fans behind his goal.
After surely the most one-sided 45 minutes of United's season,
Schalke could have taken the lead in the first 20 seconds after the
interval, and it was Raúl who should have accepted the opportunity,
racing in at the near post but failing, under Rio Ferdinand's
timely challenge, to match his old standards by making a clean
connection with Jefferson Farfán's perfect slanting pass. Six
minutes later Hernández finally had the ball in Neuer's net,
hooking it home with a brusque left-footed volley, only to be given
offside. It was not as futile a gesture as it might have seemed.
"That broke the dam," Ferguson said later. "After that the players
knew they could beat the guy."
Outside the stadium there were posters advertising a forthcoming
Oldies Marathon, starring such museum pieces as Shakin' Stevens,
the Rubettes, the Sweet, Smokie and Boney M. Eventually it was one
of the golden oldies who broke the deadlock, Giggs cruising
lethally on to Rooney's sweet reverse pass. But youth would not be
kept down and two minutes later Hernández authored an equally
cunning pass, from which Rooney suavely left the brave Neuer
helpless once again.