Bubbly re-corked as bubble bursts

LAST week I spoke of our hopes that Rooney would live up to his big-game reputation and break his drought, and when the Spud-Faced Nipper duly vindicated our trust in him just after 5pm on Sunday, you could have forgiven us all for mentally cracking open the champers.

Okay, we may have lost the game but the campaign remains ours to win, especially as we remain convinced Arsenal and Liverpool are too far back, and see that Chelsea’s implosion shows no sign of abating.

That said, I cannot deny it: that last 12 minutes at the Emirates hurt like few such periods I can recall in recent times. So we were right, as I suggested last week, to have some fear faced with Arsenal. Those of you who often email in to complain that I am too complimentary of Wenger’s outfit might want to give it a rest this week in light of their admirable, United-like stickability.

Besides, examining the shot statistics, I see Arsenal had precisely double our on and off-target efforts, so the 2:1 ratio could be argued to have been perfectly reflected in the scoreline. In other words, no crime was committed. Though I must say none of us felt quite that reasonably about it on 94 minutes.

I was surprised that we got quite an easy ride from the Monday press in Britain, most of whose denizens declared that we freakily lost a game we controlled. Maybe I am seeing this through too traditional a tint of Red specs but what I saw was a United team who did that most un-United of things: try to hold out for a 1-0 win with well over half an hour to go. That might have been the way, say, old great Liverpool sides would have done it — and very successful they were at it, too — but it has never been our way. More prosaically, we are never very good at it, either.

For five minutes after Rooney´s goal, the Gunners were visibly trembling and I expected us to go for their throat: instead we sat back and played the percentages. Ugh. If you told me we had got into their box more than three times between the 53rd and 82nd minutes, I would be amazed. Still, ‘twas of a piece with the afternoon as a whole — slightly disappointing tactical and formational tinkering from the bosses, a curiously bloodless approach physically from both sides, caution overcoming flair in passing... all-in-all, not what the doctor ordered. Novocaine instead of adrenalin, for the most part.

We grab the consolations. Carrick was decent enough for the second time in a week; Evra shows going forward why Heinze is looking at being history; Vidic continues to be everything you want a hard-case backdoor-bolt to be. And Larsson might have done us all a favour in being under-whelming enough for us to “calm down, calm down” about him being the Second Coming.

Oops, slipped a Scouseism in there. Cue nasty letters from Cork, such as one I had last week about my reference to “scousers eating rats in slums”. Mr O’Leary, it was a black-humoured cross-cultural reference to a well-known terrace song — thus a joke, of however poor a kind.

Scousers do not eat rats, I am happy to confirm. It would be cannibalism, for one (kidding! kidding!). Such is football-fan banter; it may be immature, but in a month when we remembered the 96 and the disgusting behaviour of The Sun and the South Yorkshire Police, save your outrage for the truly deserving.

* Richard Kurt is author of “The Red Army Years”