Big wins, big crowds, big problems ahead

WHY aren’t we Reds happier, hey? Consider the evidence.

Top of the league. 100% record. Bumper sellout crowds. An easy Champions League draw. Rooney and Scholes back tonight. City haven’t scored, Liverpool were just humiliated and Arsenal are stumbling out of the blocks like strangers, just as they are about to come up to Old Trafford.

And yet ecstasy is in short supply. We Reds eye each other up suspiciously: we don’t seem to believe it yet.

Moreover, last week’s off-pitch events spoke of a different ongoing story.

Fergie’s staggering and untruthful attack on activist supporters at United, together with the bizarre symbolic “dirty protest” at Carrington on Friday, reminded us that 12 points on the pitch do little to rectify the deficit MUFC have run up off it over the past couple of years with hardcore fans — especially on Fergie’s part.

Thus you have the absurdity of Fergie winning the Premiership Manager Of The Month bauble, yet remaining as divisive a figure amongst at least local Reds as he ever was, prompting the local paper to devote a whole inside-back page to letters from furious Reds attacking him.

Going back to the starting blocks analogy, where we found Arsenal flailing about ahead of Sunday, I wonder if United have flattered to deceive like a novice 400-metre runner at school. You remember the kind: flat-out sprinters from the gun, only to be found out well before the third turn. Certainly the last 20 minutes against Spurs seemed to see us grinding to a halt, and since August’s kick-off each successive performance has been less impressive.

Carrick compared unfavourably to Zakora on Saturday, which was alarming given that we were offered the latter for a third of what we paid for the former. Saha continues to look like Andy Cole — instinctively brilliant, then progressively more useless as each passing micro-second allows him to start thinking. And pondering. And trembling. And, umm, missing.

However tonight promises some genuine respite. Celtic are no Arsenal, nor even a Spurs. Admittedly, the prospect of being out-sung and out-supported by 6,000 mad Celts tonight is not one to be savoured. But giving them a good three goal-hiding in exchange would cheer us up.

Anything to shut up that wretched goblin Strachan, whose popularity with the wider public is mystifying. I suppose the same might be said — by some, not me — of the Celtic fans.

So let’s assume a victory, for once, and that’ll be the cue for yet more trumpeting from within Old Trafford, and fist-waving at Wenger as it draws nearer. There has been so much talk from the dressing room this past fortnight of the “great spirit” and how strongly we feel we will win the title that one wonders if it masks a fundamental insecurity. And when, for example, you read John O’Shea claiming “the players have heard a massive upsurge in fan noise now what we are at 75,000” you begin to wonder are we all on the same planet — or whether, more bluntly, United will now trot out any old cobblers to keep the hymn book happy-clappy (for the record, the atmosphere was even worse than ever on Saturday, and the extra 8,000 have made no difference whatsoever). Still, the lads keep insisting: we’re 100% and everything’s brilliant. One can’t prove otherwise. But this one doesn’t feel it inside just yet...

* Richard Kurt is author of ‘The Red Army Years’.