Pray our one-man show goes on

IT DID occur to me after filing my Becks-dominated column last week that it read like some kind of football obituary — and so, sadly for the lad, it now seems to be.

You’d have to be pretty blackhearted to chuckle too loudly at his fate, although some will be tempted, given that he could be accused of having spent the last few years subjugating his various employers’ needs to his maniacal desire to be ready for Ingerlund. He thus joins Owen and Hargreaves on the bench of crocked ‘Red’ oldies, upon which he may yet be joined by Rio, should his back continue to crack alarmingly (Yes, I know Hargreaves isn’t actually THAT old but, boy, doesn’t he seem to be?)

Amusingly, England’s ranks are now thinning so fast that even Gary Neville is being whispered about as a late contender, which is something you’d have got aliens-to-land odds against just three months ago.

Of course, not even all of these injuries taken together would come anywhere near to having the devastating effect of just one tiny fractured bone in the body of the Spud-Faced Nipper, who carries the burden of literally tens of millions’ prayer candles, if you add up all the worldwide United and England fans.

Offhand, I can’t think of any player who enters the spring final furlong in such an overwhelmingly critical “one-man team” position for both club and country.

England are useless without him, and United not much better, as we have painfully noted during his rare absences.

Yet if he stays fit and wonderful, he could quite conceivably end up lifting a record 19th title, a fourth Red European Cup and the World Cup.

Not even the Bobby Charlton of 1966 could have claimed to have been in quite this exquisite position. Not least as at United, he had the equally gifted Law and Best alongside him to take up the slack.

United, to put it mildly, do not have anything like the equivalent of either.

Mind you, let us still pause to praise Dimitar for yet another lovely display on Sunday, to go with his impressively disciplined performance at Wolves the week before.

You will need no reminding that I long ago dodged the bricks of the baying hate-mob and signed the Berbaphile Register with head held high; it tickles me to see so many now shamefacedly queuing up to join me, including many previously hostile hacks.

It is, I daresay, a similar process to what we have seen with the Glazers: five years of pacing Warwick Road in a sandwich board proclaiming ‘the end is nigh’ was very lonely for the small but noisy band of us who refused to go quietly into the night, but now we are enjoying the green and gold mass vindication.

As I predicted here a few weeks ago, one of the so-called Red Knights, financier Keith Harris, has now come out in Red Issue and then the News of the World to call explicitly for fans to target the Glazers’ income streams to force them out — and, crucially, to offer the guarantee that any season ticket boycotters will get their seats back if the Knights slay the Florida dragons.

Only the most flower-skippingly naive would dare to claim that this boycott campaign will now definitely a) kick off properly and b) reach the critical mass of support required.

Prising the parasites from United is going to be every bit as hard a task as was the original battle to stop them landing on us, which all the fight leaders recognised at the outset in 2004 was always far more likely to result in failure than success.

You still have to fight the war nonetheless, of course.

Liverpool arrive next, and after the giddy fool I made of myself here last autumn (“isn’t this the right moment for a repeat of Anfield 1969?” — ha!) I am eschewing the predictions, despite Liverpool FC’s wretched state. But let’s just say that, as with the GlazerWars, hope doth spring eternal (So: 4-0 it is, then?!)