Title in our hands but plenty of work left yet

MY esteemed colleague Mr Azulay will doubtless explain alongside this column how his Wonder Boys can slay European Champions one day then allow themselves to be turned into chump pies at Wigan but the Rubicon is thus crossed: somehow, after a weekend during which we quite frankly embarrassed ourselves, suddenly the Title is now in our own hands, not theirs.

Win every game and its ours — the position you always want to be in at the final turn. —

Moreover, after the sturm und drang of Saturday, we have the sensationally useless Derby next weekend, the perfect stroll-in-the-park balm to apply to our wounds.

Not to mention the satisfaction of the European qualification and, at the time of writing, the elimination of three giants (Real, Inter and AC) from the competition (I would usually conclude now that the EuroCup has thus “opened up” for us, but I used that line about the FA Cup last week. Oops).

And yet despite all that, this week finds me depressed and a tad annoyed. Such is the enduring magic of the FA Cup, one could say: I am still of the generation that takes a home cup elimination at such a latter stage to heart.

The only consolation was that Fergie fulfilled my wish of last week to see United take the tie seriously, and they did: a full-strength team, clearly trying its best. But that best wasn’t good enough, and the post-match reaction was worse: a disgrace, in fact.

Ronaldo, Carlos The Jackass and Fergie all shot their mouths off and in doing so showed us all up.

As I write, I see that Queiroz has at least had the intelligence to realise he needed to apologise, in Wengerian fashion, but I suspect Fergie will prefer to cut his own throbbing red hooter off before he follows suit. As for Ronaldo, one despairs.

“There were three fouls against me in the first five minutes,” he bleated, during a rant in which he pathetically suggested he might have to quit England if he didn’t get “more protection”.

(How very convenient a line, as his future and a possible new contract comes back onto the news agenda, incidentally).

Dearie me. George Best, what would you have made of that, old son?

Hacked to bits every week, yet you managed to make fools of every defender and were manly and brave ‘til the last.

George Best never cheated either, which is also germane here.

For unreported in the media, I notice, was an incident just two minutes before the penalty appeal in which Ronaldo took a dive to win a dangerously-placed free-kick, thus totally conning the ref.

The sort of behaviour he and Fergie promised would be cut out of his game, but which still continues almost weekly, albeit on a less obvious level than the bad old days of a dive-a-minute.

Am I just too old-fashioned in my belief that cheats have no right to complain about refereeing or hard play from opponents?

Or to point out once again that if you get a reputation as a con artist, don’t be surprised if the ref doesn’t give you every decision for which you appeal?

As for the content of the comments by Fergie and Queiroz, we need not detain ourselves: silly, heat of the moment, tab-titillating tat. That thump you hear is all of us falling off our moral high ground. And it was all going so well.

Or was it? If you look back on all the matches since the morale-crushing Christmas party scandal, you detect a pattern: every time we have played decent, motivated opposition, we have looked underwhelming.

Flat-track bully wins against north easterners, Fulham and the non-triers Arsenal flatter to deceive, you might suggest: grim displays against a poor Lyon and shattering home defeats to City and Portsmouth tell an underlying tale.

I hope I’m wrong, of course, but I am yet to be convinced that any titles “lie in our hands” in any respect other than the mathematically theoretical…

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