Ronaldo’s genius reminds fans of United’s Best days

THE papers were full of Mark Hughes’s not-so-subtle touting for the top OT job before kick-off on Sunday — very similar in tone, it must be said, to his sniffing around Big Sam’s seat the week before.

Unhappy at Ewood, Mark?! Can’t blame him, really. For a man used to the metropolitan swish of Manchester, Barcelona and Munich, the bestial moors of that grim corner of Lancashire must be less than thrilling.

If he does succeed Fergie, he will have to drop the rough-house stuff of course. Readers will know I am not the lilly-livered complaining type when it comes to opposition physicality but Rovers were over-the-top on Sunday.

The red card was, in isolation, a tad harsh — as even Fergie admitted, amazingly — but a just reward for their 90 minutes of overall clattering.

Naturally, seeing Saha spin cyclonically across the turf had us all reaching for the undertaker’s phone number but Louis has survived to fight another day. Whether he gets a further chance at starting up front is another question entirely, given how underwhelming he was.

Just hours before Rooney’s injury, Fergie had at last explicitly stated what he has clearly been thinking for some time — and what I have said here often. Namely that Saha’s future best lies in super-subbery. One clash with a head-tennis net (news of which was broken on redissue.co.uk two hours before anywhere else, incidentally) and another strategy bites the dust. Timing, yet again for United, has worked splendidly though.

Firstly, Wayne might secretly be pleased: when he did his foot in August, he said that he wished it had happened in November instead so that he could go to Las Vegas. Be careful what you wish for!

Secondly, and more seriously, one has to say that his rest period has fallen perfectly in the calendar. European qualification has just been assured, so two games are dead rubbers; and the league fixtures he will miss are certainly not the most onerous. A lovely bonus is that he can’t help out McClaren’s wretches, thus bringing ever closer the delightful prospect of an Ingerlund-free summer tourney.

And thirdly, Berbatov’s chances of joining us — as half of his feuding Bulgarian family claim he would wish — have been revived. Only last week, as Tev ‘n’ Roo mania hit the heights, most wiseacres were saying Berb had missed the boat. But the sudden savage reminder of our mortality up front plus Berbatov’s display versus Wigan surely breathes new life into the idea that just one more striker would complete what Fergie called on Sunday “my best squad ever”.

Ah yes, onto the week’s hyperbole. Fergie’s quite understandable, if slightly over-egged, comment about the squad followed a rather more suspect raft of pieces in the press claiming Ronaldo, Tevez and Rooney were the new Holy Trinity ie the equivalent of Law, Best and Charlton.

Even Paddy Crerand, who was George’s best mate in the 60s team, said he thought Ronaldo would end up the better player. (Then again, Paddy has a new autobiography to sell, so some might suggest he needed something dramatic to say to ensure he got his plug-slot in the Sunday Mirror!)

Certainly Ronnie’s seizing of Sunday’s match in a split-second had the authentic smack of genius about it but until he does something akin to what George accomplished at Wembley ‘68 or Lisbon ‘66, perhaps some patience might be in order?

All this kind of harmless guff is, I suppose, a corollary to what I was talking about the other week when lambasting the press for writing off Tev ‘n’ Roo after three weeks. Everything in football — and increasingly in life these days — has to be “the best ever” or “the worst of all time”, and all judgements definitively set in stone in the shortest timeframe possible. Tedious, is it not? Yet, with all that said: Ronaldo could, after 40 years, give us a Red European Player of the Year once more.

Bliss it is to be alive and in an OT seat in such exalted times, be they the “best ever” or not?

Richard Kurt’s “Red Army Years” is available only via [e-mail]