Well that was certainly gripping stuff. Wonderful to see how a team including players like Mata, Hazard, Oscar, De Bruyne, Schurrle etc. can be turned into one playing for the draw from the word go. He truly is The Special One, isn't he? Nice of him to leave Mata and Lukaku on the bench as well, especially after the latter scored a hat-trick against us last season.

On the other hand, we set out to attack, and then decided that this idea of Welbeck and Valencia having loads of energy and being really useful tracking back was a terrible one, and so we replaced them with Giggs and Young, one of whom admittedly played a nice couple of crosses, and the other...um...did he actually do anything? We were really reliant on our starting eleven to produce the results, as there was really nobody on the bench that we could have brought on to really change things around. I'm aware I've used the word "really" too much there. A shame that Hernandez wasn't available, as he seems to love scoring against Chelsea, and also a shame that Rafael is missing. Jones did well defensively against Hazard, but offered little going forwards. I sense that Fabio might have offered more in an attacking sense, but might have struggled defending, so Rafael was potentially the best of both worlds.

After two excellent goals against Swansea, unfortunately Welbeck decided he liked last season better, and went back to that "play really well everywhere except for the opposition area" thing and Van Persie was irritatingly quiet, which left Rooney as our main goal threat, as he whacked several hopeful shots at Petr Cech from outside the area. Despite this, and despite a number of cross-field balls picking out Ashley Cole, Rooney was probably our best player tonight. So...all that talk about not liking him was just a joke. That's all.

So, not the most entertaining of games, but I have to say I'd have taken a point beforehand.