Glazers are no American dream but Saudi owners are a United nightmare

AND with one late bound, they were free. Not just United on Saturday, but Chelsea too. Twice over, it would seem: Lampard’s goal is being credited with saving Scolari’s job, of course, but there’s also the matter of their very future as a club.

For just as we were all beginning to revel in the thought of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, along allegedly come the barbarians at the gates in the form of the Saudis.

The aggravating element of such claims for some Reds is that the Saudis had been sniffing at Old Trafford recently, as revealed in Red Issue fanzine last month, in the wake of the Saudi Telecom-MUFC link-up. The thought that they might take their petrodollars somewhere else instead, leaving us still in the increasingly desperate credit-crunched grip of the Glazers, will gall some. Not me, though.