THE TIMES
Regardless of whether they win the Champions League in Ath-ens next month, or even reach the final, Manchester United achieved something that felt more than tangible last night as they swept aside AS Roma with a stunning performance that will not be bettered in the competition this season.
Indeed, so much did they stir the passions in reaching the semi-finals for the first time since 2002 that it was tempting to wonder whether there has been a more devastating display in their 50 years of European competition.
The comparisons with Sir Matt Busby's ill-fated "Babes" of 1958, his reconstructed European Cup winners of ten years later and Sir Alex Ferguson's champions of 1999 were hard to resist for the 74,476 who were privileged enough to be at Old Trafford last night. It was a performance that invited all manner of superlatives, as Michael Carrick, Cristiano Ronaldo and even the ageless Ryan Giggs produced displays that they may struggle to surpass in the Champions League. It will send out a message that United, after several years of underachievement on the European stage, are now scaling heights that Chelsea, Liverpool, Bayern Munich and Real Madrid will surely struggle to match.
Perfection? Well, maybe not quite. There was, after all, a goal conceded to Daniele De Rossi in the 69th minute, but, by that stage, United had already scored six times to leave the stadium "rocking", as Ferguson had suggested beforehand that it would.
Even more than the number of goals they scored, it was their quality, each of them either a spectacular flash of individual skill or, in most cases, a breathtaking exhibition of pass-and-move football that was impossible to reconcile with a team who had been sluggish in defeat by Ports-mouth three days earlier and grateful to escape with a 2-1 deficit from the first leg in Rome last Wednesday.
For the record, there were two goals each for Carrick and Ronaldo, neither of whom had scored in the Champions League before, and one apiece for Alan Smith, Wayne Rooney and finally Patrice Evra, a substitute, who shot through a crowd with nine minutes remaining. Giggs did not score, but he was majestic, laying on the final pass for four of the goals. He left to a standing ovation that will last long in his memory, even if the winger, making his 107th appearance in European competition, will not have needed that to tell him that he had been involved in something special.
It was Carrick, whose influence has grown dramatically during his first season with United, who set the ball rolling in the eleventh minute. Ronaldo ran at the Roma defence and, after striding past Manci-ni, he played an intelligent pass into the space in front of Carrick. The midfield player seemed to get the ball caught in his feet after his first touch, but he recovered to take Doni by surprise with a shot that looped into the net from 25 yards.
THE GUARDIAN
Manchester United obliterated Roma and all but erased the reputation of Serie A. No one believed it possible to treat an Italian club quite like this. The victors, nonetheless, will give more thought to their immediate future than to this contribution to the lore of European football. Their burden now is the widespread expectation that they will beat Bayern Munich or Milan in the last four and go on to the Champions League final.
The panache displayed last night was all the more uncanny considering that United had seemed so careworn while losing the first leg of this tie and being beaten by Portsmouth at the weekend. Even the substitute Patrice Evra helped himself to the spoils, claiming the seventh with a drive in the 81st minute. This blistering display ranks with any in United's romantic history and the freedom of it smacked of an innocent golden age for European football in the 1960s.
Joy ambushed a manager who had perpetrated an extravagant understatement while getting a prediction right in his programme notes. "If we score tonight and I think we will," Sir Alex Ferguson had written, "we will pull this one off." Maybe he was only being coy about a premonition of what was to come.
While the gusto was irresistible, the side was set up perfectly as well. Ferguson, unexpectedly, had adopted the same 4-2-3-1 formation as Roma but there was no problem telling them apart when the Premiership team had all the width, pace and penetration.
There was certainly foresight in the planning. Wayne Rooney was nominally stationed on the left, a piece of positioning that customarily has the crowd cursing the name of Ferguson's assistant Carlos Queiroz. Like most other things that United attempted, the ploy was inspired. The logic of the battle plan also called for an unexpected selection.
Of the men available Alan Smith was the appropriate choice for the role of lone striker, even though he had not started a Premiership fixture in the current campaign. Fully recovered from the broken leg he suffered at Anfield last season, he was the ideal foil for all the players darting and spinning around him. Smith, in addition, took time off from that to score his first goal since November 19 2005.
From the start Roma had a sickly pallor and not only because Rodrigo Taddei took ill so close to kick-off that the team sheet had to be redrafted. His place went to Mirko Vucinic, who had delivered the winner in the Serie A club's 2-1 success last week. Personnel turned into an irrelevance as Cristiano Ronaldo and the others swerved round all obstacles.
THE INDIE
Before the Sir Matt Busby statue that adorns Old Trafford were skirmishes that amounted to an affront to his principles. Beneath him came seven arrests for shoplifting at the Manchester United megastore that would have made the great empire builder wince. Behind, there was a performance to make him proud.
United have spent all season commemorating the 50th anniversary of Busby's decision to defy the Football League and take the club on a tragic and triumphant journey into Europe, but no orchestrated event could conjure the celebrations ignited by last night's outstanding obliteration of Roma or deliver a more fitting tribute than a place in the Champions League semi-finals. "We want seven," the Stretford End sang, and it reflected United's ruthlessness that they were not goading the shoplifters for missing one of the club's greatest nights.
History was made as United equalled their record European victory at Old Trafford (their 10-0 annihilation of Anderlecht arrived at Maine Road), produced the biggest win in the knock-out stages of the Champions League and overturned a first-leg deficit at home for the first time since a 1984 European Cup Winners' Cup tie against Barcelona. But it is the present that drives Sir Alex Ferguson, and in that respect the second knighted Scot of Old Trafford had more to cherish than the statisticians as his latest incarnation came of age as serious contenders on the Champions League stage. The wait has been exhaustive yet worthwhile as the unheralded of this United team - Alan Smith, Michael Carrick, Darren Fletcher and Wes Brown - responded to an alarming absentee list with their finest European displays.
The sight of Smith ploughing a lone forward's role, despite not making one previous Premiership or European start in this season of rehabilitation from a shattered leg and dislocated ankle, illustrated that point to perfection. Confirmation of the Yorkshireman's recovery came in the 17th minute when Gabriel Heinze and Ryan Giggs combined to present the striker with his first goal since that career-threatening injury at Anfield. With Cristian Chivu culpable for the strike with an ill-timed slip, having been singled out for his part in Paul Scholes' dismissal at Stadio Olimpico, the moment was made even sweeter for Ferguson.
United were in dreamland, and two minutes later they were in the semi-finals. Smith released Giggs down the right, and when the Welsh winger's low cross reached the six-yard box Wayne Rooney arrived with a poacher's finish.
Though Smith and Rio Ferdinand collected needless bookings that could haunt them later in the competition, Ronaldo confirmed United were up against a beaten team when he rifled a precision finish inside Doni's near post two minutes before the break. Incredibly, this was the Portuguese international's first goal in 27 Champions League appearances and he converted his second from close range three minutes after the restart.
United's sixth was the finest of a grand collection when Carrick arrowed a drive into the top corner from 25 yards. Roma's consolation drew louder applause from the United contingent, Daniele De Rossi hooking a volley beyond Edwin Van der Sar in the 68th minute. With nine minutes remaining substitute Patrice Evra answered the Stretford End's calls for a seventh when his long-range shot somehow found its way beyond Doni. The only explanation was that he, like Roma, had long been beaten.
THE TELEGRAPH
Once, as he watched Manchester United score nine times at Old Trafford, Sir Alex Ferguson remarked that his players' performance had been of such quality that "you could have set it to music". That was a rout of an Ipswich side that was doomed to relegation; this was the destruction of the second-best team in Serie A. It was a great European symphony, an ode to joy.
The United manager has beaten better teams than Roma but to oversee this kind of display when his resources appeared so stretched would count among his finest achievements, one which typified the English stranglehold on the Champions League. He was without three-quarters of his first-choice defence, half his attack, a quarter of his midfield. Manchester United won 7-1.
Not since 1958 when Juventus conceded seven in Vienna had an Italian side suffered this kind of humiliation. Not since 1956, when they put 10 past Anderlecht, had United achieved a better result.
It would be hard to imagine the seven goals Tommy Taylor and Dennis Viollet scored between them were better than those carved out by Michael Carrick, Alan Smith, Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney. This was an astonishing restatement of United's belief and values after the defeats in Rome and Portsmouth that threatened to undermine eight months of work.
For Roma, who had come to England with the best defensive record of the quarter-finalists, this was a shattering blow. Before kick-off their captain, Francesco Totti, had pronounced this game more important than a World Cup final. Totti must have felt he was playing the Hungarians of 1954, the Brazilians of 1970 or the Dutch of 1974. Whatever it was, it was total football, epitomised by the immaculate move that brought Smith's first goal at Old Trafford since 2004.
Ferguson singled him out for special praise. "He had trained like a beast, he has shown the great qualities of patience and perseverance. Apart from Alan Smith this is not an evening that should be about individuals; everyone else did what was expected of them."