Injury-free and in-form we won’t slip up again

THERE is nothing a columnist of any kind likes better than having his most recent point instantly illustrated by subsequent events.

So the only consolation for me in last week’s silly Danish defeat, and the extra cherry on Saturday’s anniversary cake, was the further proof that United’s 2006 team is best left alone to get on with it: tinkering and rotation should stay on the bench; as I prescribed last week.

Celtic away has suddenly become a night to gird one’s loins — and perhaps fear — when by rights it ought to have been the deadest of rubbers. It would be the cruellest yet most apposite of punishments for Fergie if he were to be robbed of his Euro-dream as a result of his selectorial mucking-about in Copenhagen although — hefty wood-touch — I think we can still safely say that it’s probably not going to come to that.

Nonetheless you do groan at John O’Pie’s comments, enthusing about what a great Parkhead clash the defeat has now set up, which seems to be tweaking Fate’s nose a bit too much. Not least when O’Pie himself was one of the worst offenders in Denmark, an undeserved recipient of the tinkerer’s favours who only managed to prove that he is not good enough to be in United’s midfield at this level.

Normal service and a full-strength first-choice 11 resumed on Saturday of course, and we took full advantage of Pompey’s absurdly-depleted defence; the subsequent defeats of Arsenal and Chelsea meant that Alex must have had an anniversary celebration on a three-bottle scale.

As I’ve said many a time here, we have a first team that, when injury-free, in-form and played in position, can beat anyone in Europe. The trouble seems to start the minute management tries to shake it up, tactics or personnel-wise; then our deficiencies are exposed.

Put brutally, our hearts always tend to sink a bit when Fletcher, O’Pie or Richardson meander into the eleven — and we are thus also waiting to see how we cope with an injury-crisis. Take Scholes and Rooney out of the team, for example, and you have a barely rectifiable problem. Yet Ryan Giggs said the day before Copenhagen “our squad is strong enough. We have two or three players for each position” — a point somewhat fatally undermined within 24 hours, one feels.

Indeed, Fergie clearly accepts that more needs to be done, as his ongoing public pursuit of Owen Hargreaves makes clear. And the potential Torres deal still lingers in the ether, with the player himself going as far as to name us as one of his three next-move choices this week. Naturally he also mentioned Chelsea — don’t they all? ! — but with any luck by May he’ll be more tempted to join a champion side than a bunch of cheating, fighting, poisonous London gits.

Yes, I thoroughly enjoyed watching the charmless nerks snatch another PR disaster from the jaws of footballing triumph last week in Barcelona, capped-off by their epochal defeat at Spurs. Mourinho’s disgraceful outbursts, coming hard on the heels of his abominable mudslinging at Reading, have rightly attracted the opprobrium of every leading commentator; hard to recall now how amusing and fresh his cheek used to seem and how so many simpered empathetically at Chelsea fans’ boyish excitement when they first hit paydirt.

Mourinho is now, improbably, seen as even more graceless than Alex Ferguson while Roman Abramovich is a potentially ruinous grotesque distorter of football. Pleasingly we have a situation when Chelsea fans announcing their allegiance in public are roundly abused, just as we used to be.

It is hard to think of any club whose name has become a byword for all that is loathsome quite so fast. Even Revie’s Leeds took half a decade to become truly hated; Chelsea have reached that stage in two seasons. Whisper it, but I think the vast majority of the country wants us to take their title: ABU has finally gone ABC.”

By Richard Kurt, author of ‘The Red Army Years’