If only it wasn’t them
After last week’s Mancunian drollery on the subject of bread rolls I lay in wait with a steaming bowl of Scouse euphoria and a tray full of culinary quips.
“Hard cheese, Neville”.
“Enjoy your humble pie”.
“Another vintage Ferguson whine” — that sort of thing. I had a million of ‘em.
So you can blame the defeat on me, for indulging in the sort of presumptuous pride that invariably precipitates a fall.
Though I suspect the subject of pies will also feature in Richard’s column. However you describe it, Saturday was difficult to swallow.
Listening to a fortnight’s drivel didn’t lighten the mood. Sympathy for United fans’ experiences in Europe dissolved in the face of a cast-iron certainty that the idiots would still sing their snide songs 11 days later.
While the papers were reminding everyone how Smith’s ambulance was vaporised last year, obnoxious graffiti on Anfield Road dangerously close to the 96’s memorial was apparently being cleaned up hours before kick-off.
Witless Blues pretending to be ‘Salford Reds’ or a night-raid by the real thing? Don’t bother running it through Google because the press isn’t interested in exaggerated gossip where United fans are the alleged transgressors.
Ferguson was also allowed to get away with his “we can only play one way” bilge. The truth is that since being scarred by Houllier’s five wins in a row United haven’t really attacked at Anfield.
Four wins sparked by four goalkeeping errors. Why didn’t they ‘go for it’ on Saturday? Because “Liverpool put great pressure on us”. Is that a fact?
The truth is that United had little appetite for forward thinking and were criminally satisfied with one point never mind three.
But the legend must be printed, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Does that make me sound bitter? Undeniably. What’s made me more cantankerous than usual is the part TV pundits in England (who were once Liverpool legends) play in this Orwellian rewrite.
Alan Hansen fawned desperately over United’s commitment to attack at Fulham. Fulham! That was bad enough, but his servile claim “in my day we played for a draw” is a gross distortion of fact.
Here was a supremely gifted defender who shone with the ball at his feet. The records show Liverpool regularly returned home with three points and a bagful of goals. He’s too young to be senile, surely? Mark Lawrenson’s even worse.
There’s a mortal fear of saying boo to the golden goose. When even our own start spouting gibberish what hope is left?
The nature of Saturday’s defeat can’t have surprised anyone. It’s an annual event now. Although numerically we can almost match them in this fixture it’s how they win their share that pierces the heart.
O’Shea? Oh come on, you’re joking. Wasn’t it bad enough with Forlan and Silvestre?
If it’s Darren Fletcher next I quit here and now. Enough is enough. As for the tardiness of the goal it’s a story as old as the moors.
Only someone with no trace of irony could blather about thieving Scousers after this latest outrage. Watching Ferguson do his fat kid potty-dance on the touchline made you wonder how anyone ever behaves himself at this fixture. Barbaric urges filled my pacifist soul to bursting point.
Did we do enough to win though? Hand on heart I’m still unsure. We came close a few times, but you watched events with deepening dread.
It didn’t even matter we were carrying passengers. Sissoko suffers from the only colour-blindness that can’t distinguish white from red. That kick in the eye at Benfica wasn’t cured.
Riise’s free kick, Bellamy offside, Rooney off, Scholes off, Van Der Sar’s save, Kuyt doing his ball boy routine to stop the odious Neville wasting more precious seconds.
One last roar from the Kop as four extra minutes was announced. It could of course only lead to one conclusion.
The luck of champions? I’m not going to disagree if even Ferguson states it explicitly.
Many of the titles during our domination were clinched in April or May with wafer-thin margins, now it’s someone else’s turn.
If only it wasn’t them.
Forced to examine events with polar-cold logic you’re left comparing goalkeepers’ moments of truth, contrasting our strikers’ finishing with that of a chunky journeyman even United fans dislike.
Now in O’Shea we have to add a Liverpool fan to a late-show hall of infamy containing Greenhoff, Albiston, Whiteside, Hughes, Strachan, Cantona, Solskjaer and Ferdinand.
A veritable rogues gallery. Let’s hope there are no actual pictures. We must think of the children.
The list keeps growing like a virulent fungus, creating an itch we can never scratch.
