Mystifying decisions of some top managers

Sometimes you do wonder whether even the mightiest managers truly understand football. Or whether they, with all their huge experience, fail at times to see the wood for the trees. One is thinking of no less than Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger, whose teams clashed in a major Sunday game at the Emirates Stadium.

Was Ferguson wise to throw the 37-year-old Paul Scholes suddenly and surprisingly into the fray as a substitute against Manchester City? He promptly gave the ball away and City raced on to score. United paid the consequences that day, but in their next game, which he started, he coolly scored a goal and was generally and laudably impressive.

Clumsy error

Wenger at Arsenal, meanwhile, commands sympathy over the plethora of injuries which have afflicted his team. Yet some of his decisions have arguably worsened his team's plight, such as the expensive purchase of the big German international centre-back Per Mertesacker, who may command when the ball is in the air but looks slow and vulnerable on the turn and who gave away a goal at Norwich with a peculiarly clumsy error.

Then there is the depressing case of the Moroccan centre-forward Marouane Chamakh, who may somewhat unexpectedly have been called up by his country for the current Africa Cup of Nations, but at Arsenal has been firing nothing but blanks. As indeed he did when fielded in the absence of the team's one true bombardier, Robin van Persie, to play in the FA Cup tie against Leeds United at The Emirates. He made a decent pass or two, but never remotely threatened to score or even to be likely to shoot.

You couldn't help wondering, as you watched, why Wenger didn't use Theo Walcott as his sole striker — a role which Walcott is known to cover and which Wenger himself has said he would like him to fill. But instead Walcott was a mere substitute called on at the same time as Thierry Henry late in the second half, on the right wing, where the 18-year-old costly Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain had been showing promise.

No logic

Across London, at Chelsea, it is sometimes a little hard to see the logic of certain decisions by the new 34-year-old Portuguese manager Andre Villas-Boas.

His often questioned faith in £50 million (Dh289.5 million) Fernando Torres, desperately in search of goals, seemed to me to be at last justified when I watched him hit the bar with a superb scissors kick at home to Sunderland, the ball then bouncing into the net off a lucky Frank Lampard.

The writer is an expert on football based in England.