Thrill-a-minute ties bringing back good old days

HMM. What was I saying in my very final paragraph just last week? That we shouldn’t be wholly deceived by our Big Five wins, and that Wenger was surely right to be proclaiming he had seen future glory during his twin Manchester setbacks.

Cue six Arsenal goals — again! — to contrast with United’s off-colour Euro-tie, followed by a shambolic Saturday against a team fielding not one player who’d even make our reserves.

That said, I’m going to be contrary again and suggest this: forget the whinging about what we have recently decried — six home concessions in three games, and a flurry of substandard individual displays — and instead let us enjoy the overall ride. After all, in recent years, can you recall any previous triptych of successive home games that have contained such breathtaking excitement, such a pell-mell of incident and controversy, so many ‘games within games’? No, nor me.

After years of so often watching Ronaldo flat-track-bully inferior opposition in tedious encounters — I don’t think I am exaggerating to say that would encompass 70% of home games since 2006 — I find it thoroughly refreshing. Once more, as in the Bad/Good Old Days, you set foot inside OT tremulous and uncertain. Your heart beats faster than is healthy, you sweat a little more than necessary... don’t tell me it isn’t entertaining, even if it is occasionally more the kind of entertainment you get at a horror film. Besides, we haven’t actually LOST any of the three games, and two have had proper giddy-goat-around-the-aisles climaxes of the style we thought went out of fashion after the 90s. If this is how 2009/10 is to be, bring it on.

And is this how it is to be? Consider the prosecution case. The management actually boasts that it doesn’t know its best 11. Tactics and formations vary weekly. Personnel changes are made game-to-game with the amplifier set to ‘11’ — the dreaded Tinkerbell Peal-a-thon setting (Seven were made for Saturday. Why? Who knows. Why was a fit and practice-requiring Rio on the bench? Who knows. What awful thing must Carrick have done this summer to warrant his bizarre appearance pattern? Who knows. Why are so many of our players so unbelievably inconsistent? Who knows. One is tempted to disinter the old Rumsfeld classic about there being “known unknowns”. It all makes even less sense than Don did, frankly).

Add to all that the growing belief the Glazers have robbed all the money — meaning the supposed permutational solution has to lie within what we already have at the club — and you can see why the argument attracts.

On that last point, I draw your attention to an excellent piece in the Daily Mirror this week, highlighting the plight of the Gimps’ other team, the Tampa Bucs. Massive spending cuts, increasingly dismal displays, and revolting unhappy fans: that could be our future, if you believe the Doomlords.

The defence has a very good case to set against all that, of course, but I find I have run out of space, as often happens when I am required to spray some optimism about. I will note, however, that a lot of the defence case appears to rest on the apparently Messianic return of Hargreaves, the putative agent of miraculous Midfield Transfiguration. Mmm: I’m not sure the lad possesses a single bone joint upon which I would want to put more weight than, say, a matchbox’s worth, but we will see.

In fact, as the judge in this ongoing metaphor, I don’t care who’s ‘right’ anyway: I watch United to see the embodiment of the old skool fan values i.e. for the Red style, for sheer entertainment, and to grasp moments of unforgettable, United unique genius. And certainly not to venerate ‘end product’ like the silver fetishists at Anfield or The Bridge. So: more mad OT games like these three, and more of Berbatov’s stunning contributions therein, and I’d be perfectly happy. Wouldn’t you?”

* Richard Kurt is editor of Red Issue