We can’t match City splurge if Glazernomics is here to stay

WAKEY wakey and put last night behind you. Europe Schmeurope: never mind battling for continental and world supremacy when there’s a few battered square miles of Mancunia at stake.

Furthermore, next Sunday is not only a matter of revenge for the abysmal ‘Munich derby’ but, of course, has taken on a central importance for both clubs’ league destinies. For us, it’s the actual title, naturally, and this is clearly the toughest game we have left (notwithstanding Fergie’s bizarre comments at the PFA awards last week that the obvious training exercise at the Riverside was the one he dreaded).

Meanwhile, hard though it is to believe, City actually have the chance to springboard from this to claim a place in Europe, and on genuine footballing grounds rather than the spurious Mickey Mousery of Fair Play gubbins. These things matter to Reds: the much-loved trophy-free year-counter that famously adorned the Stretford End testifies to that. On June 10, City will mark a third of a century without a pot – 33 and a third years exactly since the Tueart bicycle kick – and many of us will be having commemorative booze-ups to celebrate.

Yet one can’t help feeling that this might prove to be the last such occasion for schadenfraude merriment, and that Sunday will be the last derby in history of its kind. By which I mean it’d be the last time we will face City in the configuration that we have so grown to love for the last 20-plus years – embarrassingly dominant Reds versus Blues who had become a universal football joke. For this summer we are steeled to witness what promises to be the single biggest transfer market splurge ever seen in UK football, as City’s Sheiks engineer their root and branch restructure of the entire squad and club.

The stories have already started too; last weekend’s press was full of City-nominated potential targets and, despite the wholly admirable reluctance of many good players to join them hitherto, the sheer weight of resources is clearly going to tell eventually. David Harrison in the News Of The World is just the latest to write that one of these jewels will be Tevez, as City are quite happy to pay the fee at which the Glazers have thus far baulked.

Such a move, given The Beast’s popularity with the Reds fans, would be hugely symbolic of the shift in the balance of Mancunian power and it would obviously not go down well – especially if it is married to a Ronaldo sale, and no compensatory acquisitions.

You can almost certainly dismiss the Kaka-to-United stories of last week too: a hack who wrote one admitted to me he didn’t believe it, and that there was no actual evidence that United were involved in any way. As Fergie somewhat incautiously exclaimed the other day: “do you really think we would spend £100m on one player?”

And thereby hangs the question – why not? After all, we are turning over record amounts of money and, in normal circumstances, we could actually consider such a deal if we wanted to. But as the Glazers are essentially putting us in the disgraceful position of making a loss, all such possibilities have gone forever. And yet Fergie has the gall to tell us, as he did two weeks ago, that the Glazers have been good for United and that Glazernomics are working. It must be the most patently absurd claim he has made in the job since he assured us that Ralphie Milne would come good eventually.

There are now only two ways this Glazer fairy story can be transformed from a Grimm to a Cinderella: either some lunatic blood-soaked Emir comes in and does a City on us, overpaying for the club and allowing the Glazers to escape with merely singed fingers, or the Yanks take an axe to the TV rights cartel, allowing them to rake in worldwide multimillions in a free-for-all. The latter would ruin competitive English football forever; the former would humiliatingly leave us no better than a tart in a harem.