His name is Rio; he wants the armband

GOOD grief, yet another international-enforced break and a particularly ill-timed one at that.

Fun though it is to watch England and France embarrass themselves of an afternoon, you nonetheless fear that United’s momentum might be affected before it ever got a chance to turn into some kind of irresistible force. The lads will doubtless all return with a collection of knocks, bruises and the after-effects of Balkan gypy tummies and, before you know it, we’ll be dropping points and allowing Fergie to blame the wicked FIFA and FA for all his woes. (Rather than blame himself for failing to strengthen the squad sufficiently to cope with such hiatuses, some would say).

Furthermore, the last thing Wayne Rooney needs at the moment is the national, rather than merely Mancunian, hack-pack poring over his supposed shortcomings and weak form over 20 pages of every paper.

Still, at least Wayne can be grateful that his big mate and drinking/gambling buddy Rio Ferdinand will perform the matey service of deflecting attention from him when it’s needed. Yes, you may all think that Rio’s frequent jaw-dropping interventions in public life off the pitch are the product of a sheer stupidity and utter lack of self-awareness but you would be wrong. They are in fact — surely, m’learned friends — cunning diversionary stink-bombs he lets off to attract public opprobrium away from less-hardened mates.

So when the notoriously media-shy Paul Scholes blundered into an abyss of political correctness by allegedly calling a ref a “poof”, along came Rio to save the day by trumping spectacularly, branding a national radio DJ a “faggot” on air.

And seemingly every day for the past couple of weeks — as he tries to flog his pathetic book in permanent press-conference mode, a book which only avoids mass-burning by virtue of not being quite as awful as Ashley Cole’s — your concern about Wayne Rooney, or any other United player, is soon forgotten as you hoot with derision at whatever imbecility or gross rewriting of history Ferdie has come out with that day. Clever, clever Rio. Not a solipsistic moron but a team player and leader, no mistake.

Ah, except, as Rio pointed out rather bitterly this week, he isn’t the team leader, is he? (That’s Gary Neville — who, to complete a pleasing ironic circuitry, has often been falsely labelled a ‘faggot’ by chanting opposition fans.) Rio archly implied that he felt he had been promised the captaincy post-Keane and was thus “gutted” not to have got it. Presumably he was too typically dozy to notice what we all did long ago, namely that when Keano couldn’t take the armband, either Gary Neville or Ryan was given it — a fairly obvious indicator, you would’ve thought, that one is not next in line to the throne. You do wonder whether Fergie reflected upon his original gushing assertion about Rio’s leadership future and realised that someone who is very liable to forget to do the coin toss if he has a shopping trip planned that afternoon may not be the perfect choice.

There is a delicious irony in the possibility that the first genuinely open Premiership in years may yet be wrecked by whatever Lord Stevens unveils. I have resisted talking much about the looming scandal here both for obvious legal reasons and because, having banged on about bungs being rampant so often over the past five years, I hardly feel the need to say ‘I told you so’.

Having perused the list of the eight clubs supposedly in the frame, as featured in the London Sunday Mirror, I see that the two most corrupted clubs in England over the past five years do not feature on it. Which in turn prompts me to ask: how could Lord Stevens already have passed almost 90% of transfers as clean, if his team have failed to get over half of the agents’ co-operation? Eventually, it may well be that the true breakthroughs come elsewhere.

Richard Kurt is author of The Red Army Years.