No joke as Fergie’s tough talk gets hammered

IT WAS a long, drawn-out footballing weekend, a rollercoaster ride spread over three days.

And it started so well on Friday: we discovered Lille will be our next Euro-opponents, a team who’ve already lost five domestic matches and who would not normally be expected to trouble us. Erm, except for last season, of course (ahem).

Fergie assures us we are “a different team” now, and that French lightning will not strike twice. Yes, apparently we are no longer the kind of outfit that visits struggling lesser lights and loses to sucker-punches (double ahem).

Saturday wasn’t bad either: an Arsenal who can’t stop trundlers like Portsmouth hoofing two into their home net shouldn’t be troubling us come May.

Fergie, meanwhile, was enjoying his quote-action, feeling brave enough to start pulling Jose Mourinho’s leg with talk about Chelsea’s chutzpah in claiming United’s title lead was only de facto two points. (Pause for another ‘ahem’ as we consult today’s league table). And Alex didn’t leave the fate-tempting teasing at that, sadly.

“Chelsea could find a new level. They could get worse,” Fergie ‘joked’.

Mmm. Or they could reach a, dare I say it, Unitedesque level of spirited character and score two quite brilliant goals to pull off a miracle comeback. Yes, Sunday’s rollercoaster was all vomit-inducing descent, to be sure, plummeting at the close into the dark nadir that was Upton Park’s defeat. Reflected Fergie afterwards: “We had some excellent opportunities, but our decision-making was off at times.”

I like the “our”, as though it was someone else whose idea of a match-saving substitution was to bring John O’Shea waddling on with seven minutes left, given the only thing he would ever have rescued so late in the day was the last potato pie in the shop window.

Indeed, it was a painful compare ‘n’ contrast job, those last 10 minutes at Goodison and Upton. Mourinho spent his dancing down the touchline, shouting new instructions, reorganising the team, galvanising the troops for a final assault. United’s bench resembled the three unwise monkeys, as The Jackass, The Ferg and Mike ‘Put The Cones Out’ Phelan stared glumly at the pitch, bereft of ideas beyond two useless, uselessly late, substitutions.

Mind you, I thought Fergie was still right to blame bad luck to some degree for our failure. On any other day either Saha or Ronaldo could’ve had hat-tricks and there’s no legislating for wonder-saves such as Green made from Ronnie. Where Fergie was surely wrong was to claim Chelsea’s win was just ‘lucky’. That wasn’t luck: it was brute force and, yes, top skill applied with a champion’s ruthless determination. Precisely what we lacked in London.

Moreover, in Rio Ferdinand and Michael Carrick we had two underachieving yet massively priced ‘superstars’ proving to be weakest links, in the latter’s case not for the first time this season. Oh the exquisite pain of seeing the pensioner Teddy Sheringham, never a particularly popular figure when at Old Trafford but still an impressive professional, unlock the United defence with a gorgeously clever stabbed ball, whereupon our 45 million defender allowed himself to be ‘rolled’ by Harewood like some Sunday park player.

I did pessimistically warn you in last week’s column that West Ham would be a likely slip-up for us a la 1992 and ‘95, didn’t I? That’s United. As Fergie said, “We make it hard for ourselves.”

I wouldn’t have it any other way. Villa at the weekend are the right opposition for us now, at least; the bloom is already fading from the O’Neill rose and I doubt Saha could misfire like that for a whole 90 minutes again. Rollercoaster, roll on.

Preferably without more Fergie fate-tempting teasing, though, eh?

Richard Kurt is author of The Red Army Years.