Beauty and the Beast: life as we know it at Old Trafford

REFEREEING decisions have been the dominant topic in much of European football for a fortnight, not least thanks to Michel Platini’s various amusing interventions.

But it’s all so much in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it? Here’s one possible intro to United v Bolton: ‘The Beauty And The Beast of the modern Man United was seemingly perfectly summed up in our two Saturday goal-strikes by Roo and Ron. The twist being that the true beauty is provided by one of our ugliest and least couth players of all time, whilst the self-basting Narcissus worshipped on a million bedroom walls spurts bestial evil from every pore when he cheats the ref, and football, like this.’

Well, that would be the Manichean view of it, and it was certainly one put forward by most media commentators and ABU fans on Saturday evening. And yet, viewing exactly the same incident live, and then its press box replays, the two best-selling British papers (The Sun and News Of The World) were both agreed that Ronnie couldn’t have done anything to avoid going down, and that all available buckets of the smelly stuff should be retained for tipping over Rob Styles instead.

Naturally, plenty of Reds are happy, in such circumstances, to grab gratefully for our old friend The Trailing Leg and then knowingly recite the mantra about how hard it to stay upright, even when you want to, when it’s swiped from underneath. So Ronnie fell to the floor faster that Wall Street, and was bailed out by a penalty rescue package from a myopic ref. As one pal put it, “what was he supposed to do — get up and wag his finger and say, ‘no ref, sorry, it wasn’t a pen?’” Fair point, indeed.

Then again, I am currently staring at a DVD freeze-frame image that shows the boy’s body already at a 45-degree angle, and yet he clearly has several inches of green clear grass around his untouched trailing leg. Perhaps it was air turbulence that unbalanced the suddenly delicate flower. Let’s just say the Italianate cult of the ‘furbo’ would appear to be alive and well at OT and leave it at that, shall we? Someone who knows all about such Latin practices arrives on Saturday at the head of his Blackburn team: Paul Ince. He was my favourite English player of the 90s, a legendary Red warrior, and a man incapable of cheating. Yet he is loudly reviled at Old Trafford by many now for an apparent lack of ‘respect’ to United shown after he returned to England. I’m afraid it’s another issue over which I am in a small minority, so we’ll just move on, whilst expressing the hope (forlorn, I suspect) that we might show a bit of class on Saturday and leave him out of our boo boy target list. If only because sharing any kind of behavioural trait with the savages of Upton Park should be anathema to us.

Besides, we already have plenty to moan about.

Clearly we are not functioning properly as a team yet, and I was taken aback to note that we are currently languishing in the bottom five of the ‘shots on target’ stat chart this season, a convenient mathematical translation of something we have all nonetheless felt in our bones so far — that now having four world-class forwards at our disposal has somehow produced little worthwhile product.

Yet I would defend Fergie’s current frenzied rotation and point to 98/99, the last time we had such a four-ply line: it took Alex until November to discover the magic Treble combination after weeks of tactical and selectorial juggling. Sometimes trial and error is all you have, so give the organ-grinder and the chimp Phelan some time.

Fergie is currently the woman rifling through a stuffed wardrobe looking for the big Date Night outfit-combo circa 6pm. You don’t risk shouting “Come on, luv, I’m parched — just stick that little black number on” until ten to eight.

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