Reality bites as capitulation complete
I also claimed that Mascherano was the man for a crisis. For sale: one crystal ball, big crack in it after being catapulted from window.
I’d spent last week reading various Red views through my fingers. Yes, we’d won a number of games and looked good in the process.
And I know how it feels. You get tired of being miserable. It is not the natural state of the supporter and if you can’t smile after seven victories, you never will again.
But (and there always is one) a certain temperance was necessary, a smidgen of perspective at least.
The quality of opponents had to be taken into consideration, the gap between those recently vanquished and those on the horizon.
Few could be warned, the optimists being rather rambunctious of late. Even the players came out with some nonsense about how United should be “worried”. Yeah, Old Trafford was awash with spat-out fingernails.
I know the lad who writes a similar column for the local paper every Friday, in which he admitted he’d placed a bet on Liverpool for the title!
He’d have been better off buying a paper to check the table — and a calculator.
Cockiness was asking for trouble, and we got it in spades on Sunday.
You felt like De Niro waiting for that punch in Raging Bull. Time stopped, it took an eternity, we knew it was coming but could not move out of the way.
Ferguson’s preposterous mind games regarding Ronaldo’s safety were surely not going to influence one of our top officials.
And his two-faced call for “respect” would surely provoke more open-mouthed astonishment than Pavarotti’s speech at a Bulimia Convention.
No, it worked. All week long there were demands to treat referees with dignity, but the campaign would not start with Cole or Terry or that odious potty-mouth Rooney.
It would start with a foreigner playing at Old Trafford. Now hands up who didn’t see that one coming? Some of the officials in England are incredibly xenophobic.
It puts us on the wrong side of the argument of course. Who doesn’t cringe when these arrogant, overpaid brats rampage across the pitch pursuing their pitiful, elderly, near-blind prey? Mascherano has a tendency to over the top in the verbal arts, and no doubt Boro fans thought of karma as he (eventually) left the field.
Yet Bennett’s cowardice overrides everything. He could see Torres being hit from behind by one United player after another, and did nothing but book Torres for complaining! So much for protecting the talent. He’d already booked the Argentinian for his first foul.
You know it’s not your day when Wes Brown joins that huge list of awful Mancs who put the ball in your net. You thought Silvestre and O’Shea were bad enough, and it’s only persistent injury that delays the worst-case scenario of a Neville strike. It’ll happen one day.
The red card took the game beyond reach, though frankly it looked ominous before that. It’s harsh to say Rafa had a convenient excuse but facts have to be faced. Ronaldo is accused of not performing in big matches but has now scored more goals in this fixture than the entire Liverpool playing staff in four years — one.
The rebound from O’Shea in 2004 is all we have to show from eight league meetings under Benitez. It’s an atrocious record, one even the incompetent Souness can laugh at.
United do have a better team, but they had that under our three previous managers and they never capitulated to Ferguson so readily and so often. The usual filth poured out of the away end, and there seemed little reaction from the home sections. It was as if they could barely summon the enmity any more, apart from the usual snide post-match ambushes.
Their revenge was sweet; an easy three points, and the harshest truth of all — they’ve almost stopped caring about us. We are no longer a threat, and that hurt more than any brick or bottle.
* Steven Kelly
