THE GUARDIAN
Manchester United opened up an emphatic lead in Group F thanks to a tentative superiority. This victory over Roma was in keeping with muted yet generally effective showings in the Premier League. At least United will not be damned as tiresome drudges so long as they can decide a match as they did this one. Wayne Rooney had not scored since a fixture at Goodison on April 28 but he is scarcely the man to end the wait by scuffing a loose ball over the line.
With 20 minutes remaining, Michael Carrick fed Nani and the Portuguese, enjoying his best showing for United to date, slipped a pass through to Rooney. The task was difficult but his angled shot found the net off the inside of the post. After that came indications that United will be deluding themselves if they try to trust in narrow successes indefinitely.
Roma ought to have equalised, but Simone Perrotta and the substitute Mauro Esposito were horribly wasteful. Still, it was an improvement on their last visit here in April when they were thrashed 7-1. Perhaps we were all gauche when envisioning Roma's craving for revenge.
The rout had come through the drama of knockout football, with Champions League extinction guaranteed for one party in that quarter-final. This game could not do major harm. Furthermore, the composition of both teams had altered substantially since the spring and Luciano Spalletti, the coach of the Serie A club, permitted only four of the line-up then to start here.
The goalkeeper Doni was among those who had dropped out and the hard-hearted would have sneered that his illness yesterday was psychosomatic. He might have enjoyed some therapy here because this contest had an academic tone. United needed 20 minutes to settle themselves.
THE TIMES
Revenge - or, more precisely, vendetta - has been the dirty word doing the rounds in Italy this week, but, for one of AS Roma's crestfallen players, it was to take the most cowardly form. A stray elbow from Mirko Vucinic in the final moments of the game last night left Cristiano Ronaldo with a bloodied face and a quivering lip. Fortunately for Manchester United, it was the only time all evening that a Roma player managed to hit his target.
The act of thuggery, which left Ronaldo in need of four stitches while United played out the final seven minutes a man short, showed that cynicism is not dead in Italian football, but, while violence on a football pitch cannot be condoned, Roma's frustration was not hard to understand. Having created - and missed - the opportunities to banish the memories of their 7-1 defeat in the Champions League quarter-final, second leg last April, Roma had fallen behind to Wayne Rooney's first goal of the season. What they did not need thereafter, as they continued to snatch at chances, was Ronaldo rubbing their noses in it.
Fiercely protective of his most captivating talents, Sir Alex Ferguson described the incident as "a shame" and, had he seen it properly, he might have called it an outrage. As it is, with Ronaldo having escaped serious injury, it will barely merit a footnote in United's season, a campaign that, unusually, is becoming defined by 1-0 victories as Ferguson's players continue to grind out results in the absence of the verve that accompanied them en route to the Premier League title and the Champions League semi-finals last spring.
This was the sixth time in the past eight matches that United have won by a solitary goal and, if that record implies that they are getting by thanks to their defence, it was not always the case last night. Despite the best efforts of Rio Ferdinand, who excelled in the home rearguard, Roma had numerous goalscoring chances, but they rarely tested Tomasz Kuszczak, United's stand-in goalkeeper, with Mauro Esposito, another substitute, particularly profligate when he snatched at two chances late in the game. Contrast this with Rooney, who had only one sight of goal and took it, turning sharply to sweep the ball beyond the reach of Gianluca Curci with 19 minutes remaining.
It was a moment of rare quality from United, the culmination of a crisp one-touch move between Ronaldo, Michael Carrick and Nani. It was just the kind of move that blew Roma away on their previous visit to Old Trafford, but the kind of quality that did for the Italian team on that occasion - "colourful attacking football full of penetration, flair and fierce finishing", as Ferguson put it in his programme notes - has been largely elusive since the dawn of the new campaign.
THE TELEGRAPH
It is the ambition of any manager to create a team who play like Arsenal, although this season Manchester United resemble the old machine run by George Graham, the one that needed only a single goal to take three points.
It is probably just as well the Glazer family do not put the same emphasis on excitement as Roman Abramovich, a man who could part company with Jose Mourinho after rumours his victories were insufficiently entertaining. Sir Alex Ferguson has been accused of many things, but never of sending out teams that were grimly efficient.
When the Glazers used so much of other people's money to buy United it would have been on the understanding that at Old Trafford entertainment came as standard. But this season the ground has been something seldom seen under Ferguson, a stadium stripped of its old imperial swagger, a ground that by the start of October has celebrated six goals.
"It is a disease; we are still looking for a vaccine for it," smiled Ferguson when reminded that this was the sixth 1-0 victory Manchester United have chiselled out in eight games. But since each goal at Old Trafford has produced two points, it is a disease that is not harmful, let alone fatal.
And yet it irritates. At half-time, Ferguson complained his team had been "too safe; in football you have to take a risk". This is a philosophy the Italian game has never accepted but then Italian football never forced season-ticket holders to buy tickets for cup games, as United do.
Had the first taste of compulsory football been last April's 7-1 destruction of Roma or even the desperate comeback to overcome AC Milan 3-2 in the first leg of the European Cup semi-final that followed, there might have been fewer complaints.
As it was your £26 bought you a 2-0 Carling Cup defeat by Coventry that left Ferguson "flabbergasted" and provided further evidence the latest batch of his "fledglings" are unlikely to fly far. And then there was this; an illustration that however great the quality on display, you cannot repeat great matches to order.
Thus far United have been outstanding in only one area - the central defensive partnership of Rio Ferdinand and Nemanja Vidic that could claim to be the best in the Champions League.
THE INDIE
In his programme address to the Old Trafford faithful before this match Sir Alex Ferguson told Old Trafford fans "don't worry", the recent run of 1-0 wins "doesn't represent a change of tactics".
There are clubs where winning 1-0 every week would be greeted with rapture but Ferguson is acutely aware that United are not among them. They are expected to win, and to do so with style, and he has spent two decades trying to satisfy that wish. The last time a spot of tactical tinkering led to the goals drying up the disgruntlement among the supporters was voluble, even if they preferred to blame Ferguson's assistant, Carlos Quieroz, rather than the Godfather himself.
Yet no one was complaining too loudly last night after another 1-0 win, against a team famously beaten 7-1 five months ago, gave United a firm grip on Group F of the Champions League. The Premier League champions had not played well and hardly deserved victory, but, thanks to Wayne Rooney's superbly taken 70th-minute goal, they gained a second win in as many group matches.
Roma and United's previous victims, Sporting Lisbon, are three points behind them and Dynamo Kiev, against whom United now play back-to-back fixtures beginning in the Ukraine on 22 October, are pointless after losing at home to Sporting last night. As Ferguson pointed out, in his pre-match spiel, "It's points that matter at this stage in Europe. I would cheerfully settle for another 1-0 win!"
Afterwards he said of United's sixth 1-0 win in eight matches [the other results being the 2-0 defeat of Chelsea and the Carling Cup loss to Coventry]: "It's a disease, I'm trying to get a vaccine for it." He added: "It's not a concern. The goals will come."
One has come, at last, for Rooney. He had not previously scored in a season interrupted by his latest metatarsal injury. It did not show as he turned on to a clever pass from Nani to drill a shot past Gianluca Curci and in off the far post.
"It will do him good," said Ferguson. "Goals always do players good. He is expected to score but this is only his fifth match and he is still trying to get his rhythm and real match fitness."
THE SUN
Pumped-up Manchester United fans rolled out of Old Trafford last night chanting raucously of being on the way to Moscow.
Just as they have in recent years trumpeted their belief they were heading for Glasgow, Istanbul, Paris and Athens.
But they still have not reached a Champions League final since the annus mirabilis of 1999.
And last night's evidence suggests Moscow next May, even at this early stage, could be just another noisy pipe dream.
Sure, United won — but it was a desperately close-run thing. But for two narrow escapes in the last seven minutes they would have been forced to share the points with a Roma side thrashed 7-1 on the same ground just 175 days ago.
And no one would have really argued with that.
Roma, beaten 4-1 at home by Inter Milan over the weekend, had come to Manchester talking about saving face and gaining new respect after the quarter-final disaster last April.
The night when they were the April shower.