Worries still linger about Inter mission

SO HERE we are again, at the dawn of one of those moments you rarely get more than once a season; a massive Old Trafford double-header, full of promise and weighted with silvery significance.

Fergie himself said it last week, in a rare slip showing that he sees things strategically rather than just keeping his head down in clichéd one-game-at-a-time mode: these next four days, if successfully negotiated, open the sunlit uplands to our troops, where immortality awaits.

No disrespect to Chelsea, domestically, or the Spanish giants (if any survive) but you cannot help feel that the real trial of 2009 is here, today and tomorrow. Which does, of course, beg the question of the effect of a failure: aye, I’m not abandoning the pessimism just yet.