Michael Carrick Relieves Manchester United Pressure With Late Goal

The most revealing moment of the night came in the 66th minute when Sir Alex Ferguson rose from his seat and started making his way to the dugout. He looked like a man who had just seen kids stealing the apples from the bottom of his garden. There was a wild expression on his face and he was gathering pace, flailing his arms, little red puffs of smoke coming out of his ears.

A few moments earlier his assistant, Mike Phelan, had tried to pass on some instructions to Wayne Rooney only for the striker to turn his back and start jogging away. Ferguson did not like what he saw and he made sure Rooney was aware of it. There was a brief, tense exchange and then Rooney ran off again, with a dismissive flick of the hand.

This was the kind of evening it had threatened to become for Manchester United. The crowd was flat, the second goal just would not arrive and Cristiano Ronaldo was running his fingers down his face in the dramatic way of his. Then Michael Carrick got away and angled his shot past the Portsmouth goalkeeper, David James, and the mood in Old Trafford suddenly shifted to that of champions-in-waiting. "Are you watching Merseyside?" they crowed.

Paul Scholes's 600th appearance for the club might not live in the memory like so many of the previous 599 but the relief was tangible and, naturally, the midfielder more than played his part as Ferguson's men eventually soothed the crowd's nerves.

The only other players in United's past to have gone beyond this milestone are Sir Bobby Charlton, Bill Foulkes and Ryan Giggs, who will reach 800 if he plays against Tottenham Hotspur on Saturday. Yet Scholes, of course, did not want a big deal made of the occasion.

Stockport County's under-14 girls' team were ushered on to the pitch before kick-off and the crowd were polite enough to feign a modicum of interest. As for Scholes, meanwhile, he quietly went about his business of warming up those ageing limbs.

No special presentations, no photo-shoots, no lump-in-the-throat speeches. It was only when the public announcer reminded the crowd that it became apparent that the United veteran was, at least, aware of the significance of the occasion – a little wave to the Stretford End, nothing too showy. Typical Scholes.

He plays a more withdrawn role these days, spraying out passes from the center circle, orchestrating the play – left, right, almost always the correct pass. The legs are not quite up to those lung-bursting runs into the opposition penalty area that were once his speciality. Even so, you get the feeling that United's supporters would rather not contemplate the fact that, come the summer of next year, Scholes will be back in Saddleworth, watching the games on television, out of the grinding routine.

Add to that possible retirements for Giggs, Gary Neville, Edwin van der Sar and, of course, Ferguson himself and United's rivals should already be looking forward to June 2010 with a childish excitement.

It is certainly easy to wonder how much further Neville's body can take him given some of his performances this season and his apparent inability to put together successive games. In fact, the defender has only managed that feat twice during the course of this campaign and he lasted only as long here as it took for Rooney to give United the lead. His foot had been sliced open, which is not as bad as a muscular strain, but Neville, at 34, increasingly resembles a boxer who has had one too many scraps but cannot quite bring himself to admit it.

Giggs, on the other hand, looks the more likely of United's thirty-somethings to defy the passing of time even though he is older than both Scholes and Neville. Ferguson marveled recently about how his longest-serving player still had some of the best results in the club when it came to fitness checks and, to watch the midfielder gliding elegantly down the left wing last night, was like a nostalgic journey into the past.

Giggs, like Scholes, has had to adapt his game over the past couple of seasons after all those years of, to quote Ferguson, "tramping up and down that bloody wing." His is usually a more central role now but there he was, scampering on to Anderson's long, searching pass and setting up Rooney for a simple finish.

By half-time, Giggs was in danger of upstaging Scholes with his elusiveness, his balance and composure on the ball, and his confidence to play the difficult pass. He was enjoying himself. He played as though affronted by the suggestion that he would be merely a sentimental choice for the PFA player-of-the-year award.