Adolescent pantomime allows Fergie land a blow without opening his eyes

FOOTBALL can be tedious. Writing about it can sometimes seem like drawing blood from a stone.

Other weeks are like the elevator scene in ‘The Shining’.

I’m feeling guilty because there is nothing more overrated and downright nauseating as Mind Games, but I could barely scrape two paragraphs together for the Stoke bore so here goes.

For me Ferguson’s reputation sprang largely from journalistic unease. They know that in 1996 they displayed inexcusable cowardice, backing his remarks instead of supporting the justifiably outraged Keegan.

That reputation has mystifyingly grown despite first Wenger and then Mourinho giving as good as they got. More, in the latter’s case.

So this adolescent pantomime has always left me cold, and whenever Benitez had his jousts with The Spesh it would always take a week to uncurl my toes.

Not a problem if you only collide meaningfully in cup-ties and watch the title race from the tortoise’s vantage point.

A reporter once compared Benitez to an arsonist; no sooner was one blaze out than he’d immediately dowse more rags in petrol. Our ever so slightly twisted firestarter may have lit his own funeral pyre with his latest brainwave, unless worry about another operation has “disturbed” him. The stuff about Gill made it even more troubling.

One’s immediate reaction was defiance. He hadn’t said anything that wasn’t common knowledge. Indeed a large section of the football world cheered.

We circled the wagons, wrestling with trivial minutiae by rounding on the media’s indiscretions. And if I see that Keegan footage again I’ll dust down the baseball bat and do some serious damage.

But for me a dream died. I’d always hoped that one day a Liverpool manager might emulate Wenger circa 1998, studiously ignoring the increasingly inane (with a silent ‘s’) drivel from Manchester’s maddest.

Fat chance of that now. I’m sure we’ll forget quickly if we’re champions in May, though it’s an ‘if’ that’s grown since the weekend, but who’d really feel like celebrating if Rafa became the biggest brat in the playpen?

It would take a more cynical man than I to suggest that because his contract talks were stalling he needed some more Fan Power behind him and that’s why he played so to the gallery.

Many lapped it up, but some didn’t. We’ve always had this Yin and Yang. Our two giants Shankly and Paisley were hugely influential but polar opposites. The brash, voluble force of nature and the shrewd, silent thinker both fight for supremacy in the collective Red psyche.

In any case what did Ferguson say that was so awful? This column, in its pre-season and halfway incarnations, said the same thing; it’ll be nice just to be involved this season.

His Sunday programme notes repeated the assertion. Despite being written before Rafa’s amateur dramatics they were highlighted as yet another victory for the Master Psychologist. Pathetic yes, sycophantic certainly but (from our angle) entirely avoidable.

Rafa’s commendable zeal for the feelings of referees and whoever organises the fixtures can and no doubt will be shattered into fragments by some perfunctory research uncovering a dozen or more quotes from the last two years.

So wait in vain for officials to rediscover their backbones at Old Trafford. The Rafapologista will even cite their visit to Stoke; no red for Rooney or Ronaldo, but one for some Staffordshire no-mark.

Yet the only difference for our trip is that late chances hit bar and post, not the net. Our three points would have been just as undeserving as theirs.

It was down to luck. For 15 years we’ve waited in vain for United’s to evaporate. Maybe we’ll have the last laugh when Satan finally calls on the Fergie residence with proof of purchase, but that’s no consolation now.

Saturday’s draw could simply have been shrugged off, a fittingly dismal performance in one of the arseholes of the western world. A bad day at the orifice.

Denied the time and space so abundant in Newcastle some of our players wilted and hid in the freezing cold, but even then victory was tantalisingly close.

Thanks to the manager’s pompous lecture on football ethics it has become something else. Had Rafa not clambered into the mind games ring with Ferguson the latter would have looked like a fool, flailing wildly at thin air despite the weekend’s results.

Now he’s landed a telling blow without even opening his eyes.