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.

THIS is a Europe-free zone today and not just because I am writing before the Roma match kicks-off (literally or figuratively).

THERE was a mild kerfuffle when the entire England cricket team were given MBEs by The Queen for winning The Ashes last year; commentators sniffed along the lines of ‘they hadn’t quite earned it yet, baby’.

THE goals may have been shared by others at Old Trafford on Saturday but few doubted whose name truly deserved to be branded onto the match’s memory; and on Monday, his penalty ensured that his almost-repeat stellar performance would be properly formalised by the scorecard-keepers.