Milan failure really hurt

SO there’s another thing me and Fergie have in common, apart from being overly partial to decent clarets and getting death-threats in the post: we will both be working this summer, and for the same reason, our failure to win the European Cup.

He, surely, cannot quit now, despite the Premiership triumph, whilst I said goodbye to over three grand at the bookies.

Not that my torn-up betting slip is the reason for my lingering sense of disgruntlement this Monday morning, a feeling that is of course utterly perverse given Sunday’s turn of events (and typical of “ungrateful” perfectionist United fans in general, some would sigh).

Don’t get me wrong: this is a tremendous position to be in. If you’d said in August, as Nistelrooy was freshly interred, that we would win the League, get to Wembley and be 45 minutes from Athens, you would be risking a visit from the men in white coats.

Moreover, the pragmatists among us are certainly right to point out that we are better off being spared a competitive match at the Bridge, which if lost would have meant a very hairy Sunday against our 1992 and 1995 nemesis West Ham, who themselves will have plenty to play hard for.

And yet the sense of anti-climax persists. The sheer awfulness of Saturday’s derby is one contributing factor, I suppose, replete with poetic justice though it was.

But of course, towering above that, is last week’s Milan defeat, the worst of its kind in Europe for us in nearly 13 years (v Barca 94). I guess this Premiership’s celebration has come just a tad too early — the Italian hangover is still lingering.

Bad though the San Siro was, surely I wasn’t alone in still thinking it could be turned round, even as late as the last 10 minutes. This is a measure of what Fergie has achieved this season. He has restored that kind of faith in our miraculous capabilities, one that was lost for the best part of three years under the Jackass Regime. Even as the third goal went in, my neighbours turned to me and calmly remarked: “so, we still need two goals: nothing’s changed.”

Naturally it will ruin our summer if the Scousers win the Champions League — and I dread the now two handed wave with six digits aloft that the Kop will taunt us with — but we should remain spiritually at ease about the path we have chosen. For, like our counterparts in Spain and Italy, Barcelona and Juventus, we have come to accept that being our nation’s most loved and most glorious — in the Napoleonic sense — is not going to translate into a tally of European Cups to rival Liverpool, AC or Real’s. We will never stop trying, just as Barca and Juve don’t either — but it is the way we try, not the actual outcome of the effort, that we define ourselves by. And God help us if we become a club of penalty shoot-out scabbers and long ball merchants. Oh dear, that did sound a tad bitter, didn’t it. In a Sarkozyesque show of respect to Mr Kelly, I congratulate him and console myself with the thought that the proper football club made the final, rather than the collection of mercenaries and tradition-free glory hunters who constituted their defeated opponents.

Winning the title has certainly taken the political heat off, although the Florida boys did get a rude reminder the other week that no rubicon has yet been crossed, when Bryan and the boys underwent a missile assault from Reds at the Lowry Hotel in Salford. They will get more of that if they don’t come through on all their promises this summer, given that the Milan defeat told us all what we know to be the bleedin obvious: the squad is too small, Carrick needs an ‘Owen Hargreaves’ next to him; we require at least one more top striker to avoid forcing Rooney up front on his own; Scholes and Giggs cannot be expected to last forever; Fletcher and Heinze shouldn’t ever be first choice players. That sounds like quite a list but in fact we are only talking about three new ‘big’ players, plus the recall of all the squad players on loan. If the Glazers can’t even finance that, especially given the proceeds of the likely sales of Saha and maybe Heinze — then we will finally realise the extent of the strategic impasse many critics claim the debt has forced us into, wherein 2007 will represent a last great hurrah of the Fergie era rather than the harbinger of a new golden age. Which would be criminal, given that we truly are at the “one last push” stage in terms of the European Cup, and have re-established a proper Premiership supremacy. And we have Ronaldo and Rooney, of course. We mainly lost in Milan because they didn’t perform and the rest are rarely good enough to compensate when that happens. Next time, Fergie will hope, the rest of them — suitably reinforced this summer — will be up to it.

Richard Kurt whose Red Army Years will be republished this month.