Manchester United 1 – Chelsea 1

It’s the final whistle after a 3 minutes added time, and two giants, Manchester United and Chelsea, shared a 1-1 draw at Old Trafford. United led through a brilliant goal from Saha, although Ronaldo could’ve sealed the victory early in the second half, only to snatch at it. The miss along with another half-chance from Heinze’s cross on the left apparently came to haunt United when Ricardo Carvalho headed an equalizer on the 70th minute. United clearly dictated the play from the width of the field throughout the first half although Chelsea clearly taken the initiatives from the midfield throughout the second half.

A couple of notes from the game :

+ I would’ve hoped that Ferguson made a substitution midway through the 2nd half when Chelsea clearly were controlling the midfield while United is up 1-0. Putting Fletcher for Saha would put another body in the midfield, and Giggs could be playing in a withdrawn role, while that would give Saha a breather for the next game.

+ Did Saha somehow headed the ball into his own net? The replay TV somehow suggested that might be the case although it could’ve been just a slight touch.

As a United fan, I’m clearly disappointed that we are not leading by 6 points at the end, although as a football fan, it was an impressive game for both sides, high tempo, frenetic, full of passion and energy with an absolutely amazing atmosphere. As one football commentators indicated, at the end, the winner is football. I couldn’t agree more.

Showdown at Old Trafford

In a few hours, Manchester United will kick-off one of the most important game of their season, at home against Chelsea with 3 points advantage in the Premiership. Both teams are off from a 0-1 lost in the Champions League in midweek, although the loss had more destructing effect on United’s campaign rather than that of Chelsea. Nevertheless, Manchester United form in the league this season has been brilliant, even when things went wrong, the team still managed to find a way to score the winning goal. That is what made them a little different from the sub-par team during the last couple of years. They are more determined … and they seems to have reasons to fight.

On the other hand, Chelsea team of superstars are just doing the minimum things to get them, well winning 1-0 against West Ham last week, and a few others games which they just won it without any impressive diplay given the strength and depth of their roster. Having said that, any manager would bark back at you with that comments with that what matter is 3 points at the end of day. Point taken. Couldn’t be more true, but in the context of football mangement, and totally NOT in the context of supporters … football fanatics. You probably could ask Johan Cruyff.

Two teams with momentums given different type of mentality, and with the English Premiership title is once again up for grabs for anyone else besides Chelsea, that’s why this is one of the biggest match for the Premiership heading into a hectic festive season. If United could extend the lead to 6 points, it would be the first time since 2003 –coincidentally that’s the last year of Beckham’s playing days at Old Trafford –the Red Devils have a real shot at the league title, once again. That would also signal to the rest of the Premiership teams that Chelsea is not afterall invincible. Well, of course the story could be totally different if Chelsea came out with a stunning victory just like what Arsenal did earlier this season without Thierry Henry.

mindcubes’ prediction

Rooney, when he’s on top form, has been able to perform huge on big games, either for Manchester United or for England. This will be no different, especially watching him in the last few league games, and with Saha looking tired, Rooney would be pivotal to United, as well as for Scholes and Carrick to continue performing the type of one-two touch passing game that Eric Cantona would be so proud to see. Giggs has shown that age is not a barrier to play at the highest level in the Premierhsip, and his assists would be crucial in this game, as well as for Ronaldo to continue his much improved form this season, albeit his needs to improve on his finishing touch. At the back , van der Sar needs to be on top of his game with Vidic continually becoming one of the best defenders that United have had in the past few years along with captain Neville ensuring a fine display as a wing back. United is alive again this season, and Chelsea would be able to taste what Bolton, Portsmouth, Liverpool, and Newcastle have experienced this season, that is United is back. And back with style.

UNITED 2 – CHELSEA 0

What’s Up with AC Milan?

The 1-2 lost at home to Roma over the last weekend marked the 4th successive defeat of AC Milan in the Serie A Italian league, although not that that many people these days care too much about that league any longer ever since the blown-up bribery case that has demolited Juventus to the Serie B and severe penalty point punishment to Milan, Lazio, Fiorentina, and Reggina.

It’s rather strange to see how that would happen to Milan who has virtually unchanged team except for the high-profile move of Shevchenko to Chelsea just before the start of the World Cup. They still have Gilardino, who played pretty well last year, and the return of both Pirlo and Gattuso from their glorious World Cup, as well as Real Madrid’s ever wanted man, Kaka. And here’s more discomforting stats, they’ve lost to Atalanta and Palermo, although the latter is now sitting at the summit of Serie A table, even more suprisingly.

In the Champions’ League though Milan is almost sure to go through to the next round, after being admitted to the competittion at the 11th hour –due to UEFA’s inability to find enough evidence and precedence to suspend them from the competition due to the bribery case, and apparently they were pretty lucky to be drawn in a very weak group along AEK Athens, Anderlecht, and Lille after a hard-fought win against Crvena Zvezda in the qualifying stage. Nonetheless, Kaka’s performance has been pretty sparkling in this competition, and with their strong history, the Champions’ League seems to be the only chance for AC Milan to add to their silverware after a disappointing exit from last year’s semifinal to the eventual winner Barcelona –although note that Shevchenko’s goal during the 2nd leg is valid as Puyol just threw himself into the ground. Nonetheless, football is football. Referee is human, and only with video replay can things like this be resolved, although I don’t really understand why FIFA strongly rejects this proposal. Today is the year of 2006, the football field is that huge, and with a referee and two aged linesmen, how would it be possible that football still doesn’t leverage technology?

Back to the original story, with almost a third of the season already gone, and Milan is now at 16th on the league table, it’s probably time for Ancelotti to give more playing time to Yoann Gourcuff, who is dubbed to be the next Zidane after a sparkling performance in the French league for a couple of years. Watching some of his clips, that claim is understandable as his moves, posture, and playing style does show some reminiscent of Zidane, although I don’t think there will be anyone can replace Zidane, just as no one can ever replace Platini. It would be interesting to see how well he’ll grow at Milan, especially with the fact that Serie A these days has been lack of stars compared with the Premiership, an ever decreasing stadium attendance, and with the bribery case has just set the final damage, the Federation probably need to do something to restore their once brilliant league with necessary actions, and so does AC Milan. They need to step out of this zone to get back to their old self, winning.

fdisk

Tonight will be the night … for me to recover my Linux partition after a disaster last week during my attempt to re-create an initrd after I recompiled my kernel for AGP support. Somehow I forgot to create the initrd, rebooted the harddisk, only later when I created the initrd I was prompted the error that the /lib/modules/… wasn’t a directory. So, here’s what I did: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1022k count=1000 … that last part is a laughing stock!! Effectively the first GB of my hard-disk is wiped out, and I’m hoping now that with my Fedora Core Rescue CD and a surprisingly kept cylinder information on my hard-disk partition, I would be able to recover some of my data with fdisk.

Finger crossed, and I’ll post more on this later for the after-effects.

Rooney, Denver, and kernel …

You might’ve wondered what does Rooney has to do with Denver, and what the heck are those related to kernel? Have I gone out of my mind? Oh, well you’ll find out!!

The Rooney Show

By far, Manchester United 4-0 performance against Bolton away at Reebok stadium last Saturday is the best team performance this season, led by the tenacious birthday boy Rooney’s brilliant hat-trick. Everyone is involved in the game, from van der Sar, who made an important save just before half-time to keep the score 2-0 to Carrick who showed why he is worth over 19 million pounds. Two assists including a magnificent inch perfect long pass to Saha who setup the third goal for Cristiano Ronaldo. The scoreline might’ve been a little unfair to Bolton who showed their resiliency midway through the first half and showed some promises in the beginning of the second half, although at the end of the day Manchester United fully deserved to win, and not only winning, but winning with style, a flowing football style that was the characteristic of the Cantona-led team during the 90s that ignited the English football. Brilliant!!

The defense finally leaked

In a game where Peyton Manning showed the world why he got picked first before Ryan Leaf –oh yeah if anyone still remembers this guy — Denver defense finally leaked, and not only leaked out but is sent back from immortality that was hyped after an inspiring start to the season. It didn’t surprise to me that they finally gave up the TD, but to give up over 30+ points playing at home against a team that has lost their running game is a little too disappointed. The Broncos offense finally contributed positively, with Plummer’s ratings above 100, but it’s the same story that keeps repeating in each of every Broncos’ lost to the Colts, a weak secondary that is overly exposed by Manning’s perfection in reading coverage and adjusting the play at scrimmage. This time, it wasn’t Lenny Walls, but it’s Darrent Williams, who prior to this game hasn’t been that much exposed and contributed hugely to the Denver’s defense from the successful secondary focused draft class.

It’s a disappointing loss, especially when it happened at home, breaking up a streak, but losing this game early on is much better than rollin’ high only to lost like this in the playoff. I’m speaking with the assumption that the Broncos will make it to the playoff, and I do believe they will, although competition is now tight with both Chargers and your truly Broncos sitting altogether at the summit of AFC West at 5-2.

Next stop: @ Pittsburgh!!

Kernel

These few days I’ve been busy with recompiling my Linux 2.6 kernel to include support for DRI, of which I need to have my brand new 1440×900 widescreen LCD to show-up nicely. It’s been quite a while since I last messing around with the kernel, and I need to refresh some of my memory, especially on changing the Makefile and where to find my config file! I’ll post more on this later on.

Oh and back to the beginning of the story, well, that’s it folks. It’s almost Wednesday here in Singapore, have a good the rest of the week!

Firefox 2 is fired-up!

Boys and girls, girls and boys, Firefox 2 has been released!! Grab it while it’s fresh!

Just a little over a week after Microsoft released their “overly” anticipated IE 7, Firefox has come up with an even better browser, Firefox 2.

Are you ready for a war!?!!

code search by google

another awesome service provided google, the code search, capitalizing on their search capabilities. many open source repositories are now easily searched with this, which i believe will only make them even better especially in terms of having more eyeballs looking at them, and having them fixed … sweet stuff!

it’s home sweet home

as many storied start-ups begin from a little garage in silicon valley, google’s own story isn’t that much different, at the same time inspiring. well, today google has bought its once playground as their own properties, although details of its usage has yet to be released

the long tail … a cauda longa …

as the long tail phenomenon is taking place, i’m half-way through chris anderson’s awesome book titled, well ‘the long tail’. the thoughts are well supported by statistics –well the book is about statistics in a broader sense, and it made us realize in a conscious and scientific way why google is so successful and why the wisdom of the crowds rule the marketing strategy of a few, at least the world is now starting to show the true democratic way of what consumer wants and in terms how they want to get it. awesome book and i’ll try to write bits and pieces that interest me the most while i’m finishing it up, and a final review at the end. stay tuned …

measure it!!

one of the best firefox extension that i’ve been using for quite some time, this little ruler is very handy when you want to use a “ruler” to measure the length of any object in your firefox. simply awesome!!