United can’t be too smug despite week of pure joy

I’M on a hard-earned holiday this week, richly deserved of course, and the same applies to United, whose players can reflect on a week of almost pure joy.

If one could select two missions that best encapsulate what United fans have most desired for the past 50 years, then conquering the twin peaks of (a) Manchester and (b) continental Europe fits the bill.

The 3-1 victories over Benfica and City neatly boxed off Part One of this season’s instalment, and to then be able to sit back and watch the two London pretenders exhaust each other provided the proverbial ribbon.

Not that one should get too smug. For example, wonder if we could give such a good account of ourselves at the Bridge as did Arsenal with last season’s humiliation as fresh in the mind as ever.

And watching Essien’s wonderstrike you had to admire the Blues’ unflappability, even as they stood to surrender an extraordinary home record. I also ask myself if our supposed Essien equivalent, Michael Carrick, would ever be able to score such a goal.

Or, frankly, any goal: he must have the worst scoring record of any eight-figure midfielder in the world. But let’s not carp, not even at Rio Ferdinand’s hideous goal celebration in which he celebrated the gung-ho gun-toting of his favourite video game — the same Rio Ferdinand who filled the front page of his pet paper, The Sun, only last week with his “campaign” against knife and gun crime. Consistency was never his strong suit.

No, carp not, not even at Fergie’s comment last week wondering “why my team makes everything so hard” à propos Euro-qualification. I think his team and his fans could provide a reason for that, as highlighted in the first-half against Benfica, when once again Fergie chose to tinker with a winning team and formation in order to kowtow to an opponent’s line-up.

It was worth the pain for that first 45 minutes’ pants-filling to see Fergie forced to abandon his ‘cunning plan’ and revert to 4-4-2 where upon we dominated with ease. You might think the lesson should have been learned but I still wouldn’t bet against him doing the same in the next round.

One begins to wonder if this has become a point he feels he has to prove — that sometime in the future we will somehow triumph playing 4-5-1 or some such, with Rooney at left back and Evra at centre forward, allowing Fergie to scream “told you so” at the hacks.

At which point he will finally feel able to put the system in the dusty back of the tactics cupboard, preferably alongside a taped and bound Quieroz, never to be unfurled again.

It was typical of United’s complete lack of corporate grace or PR no-how that at such a moment of red bonhomie as Sunday afternoon the turncoat chief executive David Gill should emerge from his dollar-wallpapered bunker to make remarks linking our autumnal good fortunes to the stewardship of the Glazers.

Talk about “pi**ing in the soup” as our French friends put it.

Gill actually claimed that the fact 76,000 were turning up to Old Trafford regularly proved that the fans have no problem with the owners. Not only is this absurd claim blatantly untrue, it is hardly a politically wise line to punt. Surely he doesn’t want Glazer-sceptic fans, of whom there are thousands, to feel that by buying a ticket they are also being counted as having ‘voted’ for Glazer?

Some might prefer not to be quite so regular if that is how they are to be taken. Far more germane to the debate over the owner’s reputation is the forthcoming transfer window.

Last summer was rated as a holding-pattern ‘score-draw’ in most red eyes: we spent on Carrick, but failed to get Owen Hargreaves or Torres. All autumn there had been leaks from OT that Hargreaves would be a goer-again come January, coupled with hints from Madrid that another attempt for Torres might come off. But last week, Fergie signed Larsson on loan and then declared that would be it — his new favourite journalistic mouth-piece Bob Cass rubbed the point home in his Mail on Sunday column, writing that there would be no move in January for either Torres or Klose. (Mind you he didn’t mention Hargreaves: Freudian omission?)

The mention of Miroslav Klose intrigues us as the player hasn’t really been widely linked to United. It makes one wonder if Cass might’ve been sold a pup, just as he was when Freddie Shepherd assured him Glenn Roeder would not be the next Newcastle manager. I happen to know Klose’s agent phoned the OT switchboard asking to be put through to Fergie just before the World Cup semi-final last July, so it would appear there has been some desire for a move, at least from the German end.

Whatever: if Larsson is indeed the only winter signing then given the thin resources of our squad and the incredible good luck we’ve had with injuries so far, I would suggest to David Gill that fans’ happiness with the Glazers’ stewardship will not be quite as unbounded as he suggests.

Let us not get ahead of ourselves. We have plenty of opportunities before the window opens to create cock-ups of our own without the aid of the Glazers! Such as on Sunday, against a woeful West Ham, a supposed odds-on away-win banker. Just what they said before we went to Upton Park in 1992 and 1995.

Ever the pessimist — but at least I am never disappointed.