AGONY AND ECSTASY: Manchester United’s Rio Ferdinand and Ryan Giggs race to celebrate with Anderson who scored the winning penalty in the Carling Cup final shoot-out at Wembley.

CIAO BELLO — now wipe that pasta sauce from your mouth and down that Perroni, for we have pies, beer ‘n’ silverware to look forward to at Wembley on Sunday. And after a decade of badmouthing the League Cup, to the extent that many of my crew barely recognised it as a first-class tournament anymore, I confess to a feeling of mild anticipation as the Final hoves into view.

WATCHING Welbeck, Gibson and Evans had me humming ‘if the kids are United’ as of old. It was a record we used to enjoy at OT almost a generation before some of them were born.

AS Torres’ second went in, to give the jammy Scousers their laboured win against a Chelsea side unfairly reduced to ten men, few could resist the temptation to declare this the week that the title race finally became a proper Red v Red death-match for the first time in almost 30 years. If Rafa can avoid reproducing his Keegan impression, that is.

ANOTHER day, another Berbatov icepick to the head of the opposition. Suddenly the ‘Whither Berbatov?’ think-pieces are thin on the media ground. Harrumph.

AND with one late bound, they were free. Not just United on Saturday, but Chelsea too. Twice over, it would seem: Lampard’s goal is being credited with saving Scolari’s job, of course, but there’s also the matter of their very future as a club.

IT had been brass monkeys weather all week in Manchester until the day Chelsea arrived, when the thermometer shot up eight degrees.

YOU have got to love the way football defies economic realities. The world’s most precariously indebted club is beginning to whisper the world ‘quintuple’ whilst the planet’s richest has just ensured its 33rd trophyless year.

IT’S the time of year for facing truths and making resolutions so we might as well start by admitting that we are becoming a tad concerned about the failure of the Liverpool title bandwagon to derail so far.

GREETINGS from my Christmas holiday base, where I am escaping the vicious UK weather and economic collapse; I figure what’s good for the players is good for the fans too.