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.

Loathsome the Gimps may be, and a £50m-per-annum drain on Fergie’s resources to boot, but at least they don’t run a disgustingly repressive medieval regime or have blood on their hands.

Blimey, top-flight football has come to something, hasn’t it: little could I have imagined, back in 2005 as we vented spleen over Glazer business practices that were then widely regarded as atrociously beyond the pale, that four years on they would look positively benign in comparison to some subsequent incomers.

Look at the roll call of plaster saints, rogues or outright criminals that have followed. The Saudis would take it up one level further: one can only wonder what horrors will be next. Tehran buying Newcastle? As the laughable ‘fit and proper person test’ introduced by the FA basically entails someone signing a piece of paper saying “I am not a crook, honest”, who can tell?

Was Napoleon right after all — that we ARE just a nation of shopkeepers, whose only morality revolves around the gold coin? But that’s enough English self-disgust for one day, however nicely that must go down in Ireland and elsewhere.

I hope we had something to be proud of last night in the semi-final, or that at least Fergie kept his promise to field as many kids as possible in the side. No disrespect to the squaddies, however, in hoping that tinkering is kept to a minimum for Spurs in the FA Cup this weekend, given the unfinished business from last year and the desire to see Redknapp humiliated. And if ever there was a perfect moment for Berbatov to climax his rapid rise from underneath the doubters’ shackles these past few weeks, Saturday will be it. Against Bolton, Berbatov elected to do the biz, at the most orgasmic moment possible.

Why win a game at 63 when you can do it at 90? He’s pure United.

I recall writing when he first came to OT with Spurs, when he did a sublime ‘take the ball from the sky and strike in one move’, that he was clearly made for us.

It’s the only second I can recall from that game. I can’t even remember who scored and won it for us but could pain that Berb half-a-second from memory until I die.

That is United. That is glory.

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