Looking into abyss signposted ‘second-best in your own town’

LAST WEEK had gone so well: then the weekend’s clouds started to gather.

Picture us last Friday, if you will. Drunkenly roasting to pink perfection under the Côte d’Azur skies, chuckling at the easiest Champions League group stage draw any of us can remember, hooting in derision at the news Everton’s suckers had agreed to buy Saha…

Not even Super Cup defeat by the Russians that night affected the bonhomie, glorified training session that it was. Even Paul Scholes’ uncharacteristically moronic red card, which will cost him the Villarreal match, was shrugged off as nothing more than the understandable if regrettable maddening effect of 27 C heat on an asthmatic Northerner.