It took a Paul Scholes header to get us past Besiktas the other day, in what was otherwise, a mind-numbingly stodgy match. Passes went astray, Rooney left isolated — frustrated, even — wingers failing to provide a cutting edge consistently; all in all, a classic away European performance from the runners-up.

United’s performances, despite their superior results in comparison to the last two seasons, have been schizophrenic, for want of a better word. But a relative constant, in all of Ferguson’s methodical(?) madness of rotation, has been Paul Scholes.

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Pardon the overly extreme headline — and this will be a short one, I promise — but it’s things like these that rub bloggers or independent reporters the wrong way. You would expect the mainstream media to follow basic journalistic etiquette; if it’s a quote you attribute the source, or give credit where it’s due.

About four days ago we had published an exclusive Vidic interview on this site. Today you will have seen the same quotes plastered over The Sun and Skysports.com — I don’t want to link back to those articles but you can easily find them. [Thanks to Stephen Darwin for bringing it to my attention]. As far as I know right now, these are the two mainstream outlets that have published them. None of them credited us. I don’t want to go on a longer rant about doing the right thing, or cry out to them about wanting attention from the mainstream press, but I feel it right to call these people out on this act because I have seen plenty of bloggers face the kind of injustice the press seem to get away with.

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Rant over. I will post something United related later in the day. Till then comment away.

The pain of Manchester United’s comprehensive Champions League final defeat to Barcelona in May triggered a summer of upheaval at Old Trafford with star turns Cristiano Ronaldo and Carlos Tevez seeking pastures new – but despite those defections the Premier League champions are still rightly among the leading fancies to land this season’s European crown.

During preparations for their opening Group B clash away to Turkish champions Besiktas, Red Rants caught up with United’s colossal defender Nemanja Vidic (arguably one of Ferguson’s best buys in the last 4 years) to find out what he makes of the new-look United and the prospects of Sir Alex Ferguson’s outfit reaching a third successive Champions League final…

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David Gill has been elected into the top executive board of members in the European Club Association which, many of you might remember, was formed under the auspices of the UEFA following the dissolution of the G14.

“I’m obviously very pleased to be elected,” Gill said. “The ECA has a very important role to play in the relationship with Uefa and other bodies within European and world football. We are the people who run the clubs, we understand the issues. All parties need to work together to come up with a set of rules and regulations that everyone buys into.”

Perez added that he was: “Very happy to be able to work for the clubs inside the big European football family.”

Florentino Perez’s influence (as someone known to favour a European super league) cannot be ignored, and it would be interesting to see what holds for the future of European club football in the coming years.

If reports in the Portuguese media are to be believed Rodrigo Possebon, who was loaned out to SC Braga, has returned to Manchester. Google translate is not the best, but according to this link, he’s been axed because of a squad trimming exercise by the coach.

I also saw it mentioned on the United Youth site in its roundup of our loanees. It’s a bit surprising it hasn’t been mentioned in the main United website.

Anyone who has any updates on this, do share in the comments.

United have released a list of their Champions’ League squad members, and importantly, Owen Hargreaves is a part of it. The 25-man squad also includes Kiko Macheda, Gabriel Obertan and Darron Gibson. However, Anderson has been relegated to the secondary list of additional 10 members which includes Welbeck and Evans.

Curiously, Zoran Tosic doesn’t even feature in any of the lineups.

25-man squad: 1.Van der Sar, 2.Neville, 3.Evra, 4.Hargreaves, 5.Ferdinand, 6.Brown, 7.Owen, 9.Berbatov, 10.Rooney, 11.Giggs, 12.Foster, 13.Park, 15.Vidic, 16.Carrick, 17.Nani, 18.Scholes, 20.Fabio, 21.Rafael, 22.O’Shea, 24.Fletcher, 25.Valencia, 26.Obertan, 27.Macheda, 28.Gibson, 29.Kuszczak.

Additional players registered: 8.Anderson, 19.Welbeck, 23.J.Evans, 31.C.Evans, 33.Hewson, 36.Gray, 37.Cathcart, 38.Zieler, 39.Chester, 40.Amos.

Edit: Another strange exclusion is Richie de Laet

Edit 2: according to UEFA rules additional players could be added i.e., any player born on or after 1 January 1988 who has been eligible to play for the club for any uninterrupted period of two years since his 15th birthday.

Scott at Republik of Mancunia made a valiant effort at throwing a positive spin on Saturday’s result. Of course, it was a win after all, so, really, what can be more positive than that? And he did a good job of trying to alleviate certain shreds of negativism that may have afflicted a lot of United fans.

However, if you were to ask me what I thought of yesterday, I’d say it’s among the strangest matches I’ve ever seen against ‘big four’ opposition. (Yes, even the 1-0 at Anfield, many moons ago, felt different. In that game the win tasted sweet. Here, I really don’t know what I’m having.)

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Goal videos of the match below:

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Sir Alex Ferguson has made a few things clear about his plans for our central midfielders today, and it answered some questions (and debunked some rumours doing the rounds lately).

When asked about Carrick and Anderson, he said, “there are no issues at all.”

“Michael wasn’t involved against Birmingham or Wigan because we played Burnley on the Wednesday and it was a chance to freshen up. That’s exactly what he did. We also had [Darren] Fletcher and [Paul] Scholes back [for Wigan}, so it was just a matter of freshening it up. Anderson was also left out. I read stuff about a dust-up with Anderson which is absolute rubbish. Absolute nonsense.”

He also spoke about Gibson, which should encourage the lad, and make us expect a lot more appearances from him this season. “We are also trying to push Gibson on as much as we can because the boy has improved at a fantastic rate of knots. We’ve been really impressed with him. That’s the reason. There’s no reason other than that.”

Other than a dramatic turnaround, that should put to rest any speculation on us making more signings in central midfield this summer. Speaking of midfielders, Hargreaves is expected to return in late September.

And finally, for sake of completeness on midfielders, here is an article in the Guardian on Darren Fletcher; Louise Taylor being the latest to latch onto the praise-Darren-Fletcher bandwagon — something we’ve banged on about for a long time.

You can read the live MBM reports here and here.

I am still unsure on the exact dates, but I can only hope we don’t travel to Moscow in December. It’s always tough at that time of the year. Either way, with Turkey and Russian clubs in our group, we have some serious travelling to do. Away from home Besiktas can be tricky, and CSKA Moscow formidable.

But in Wolfsburg, we have a free scoring opponent that can surely cause a lot of problems.

This is certainly not an easy draw, but by no means is it the worst one either. CSKA Moscow and Wolfsburg are two genuine contenders from our group, and qualification will be a hard fight.