IF I may get all Arnie on your ass for an intro: farewell Jose, The Terminated, and enter Coneman The Barbarian, as Avi Grant has been so cruelly dubbed. I note Mrs Grant also made a splash, so to speak, in the weekend papers here for ingesting her own urine on Israeli tv.

THE call came into my news bunker one night last week.

YET another wretched international break with its enforced trips to Tesco with the wife — although one is disturbed to note that, for the second successive such hiatus, Reds might be grateful for the pause in play.

WHODATHUNK we would be praying for Saha to leave hospital for once?

CRISIS? What crisis?” asked Fergie in Jim Callaghan mode before the press pack last week — and despite me being the type always to decry a glass as being half-empty, surely he had a point?

MANCHESTER CITY can sometimes make you laugh for reasons other than their legendary ineptitude.

SO there was Fergie, chatting away to the press quite amiably last week: “The thing about being on holiday is that you get the fixture list. And as soon as you get that fixture list, you start to plan. You are looking at the first games…”

SO there’s another thing me and Fergie have in common, apart from being overly partial to decent clarets and getting death-threats in the post: we will both be working this summer, and for the same reason, our failure to win the European Cup.

I WRITE en route to Milan, with memories flooding back of the last trip I made to Italy for a European Cup semi-final.

BEFORE the first leg of the European Cup quarter-final, I wrote here that we were looking to the young god Ronaldo and hoping, perhaps, that Rome ‘07 might be read as Benfica ’66: namely, that we would achieve a result as historic as that classic quarter-final and that the Madeiran might yet be bracketed with George Best, should he make the impact that he promised.