A comical day at the Cottage

WHEN I first glanced at the Craven Cottage team sheet, I thought Fergie had done a ‘Mick McCarthy’. No such luck: this, apparently, was the best team we could put out. What a fitting way to round off an ignominious week.

Actually, Saturday was surely the least regrettable of the week’s various embarrassments. Frankly, it bordered on the comic. Witnessing the makeshift three-man defence made up of midfielders and children blunder about, with Old Man Scholes in front of them dropping everything he touched, was like watching an amateur family on the old “Generation Game” cocking up some expert task in front of a guffawing Bruce Forsyth. Travelling Reds seemed to pick up on the vibe, and spent the last 20 minutes deafening the stadium with insouciant uproarious songs, drawing a rare tribute from Fergie himself afterwards.

The press later described the afternoon in apocalyptic terms but surely no-one should be drawing serious conclusions about our prospects, given the state of Carrington’s outpatients queue? Fergie amusingly used to refer to these moments as “cracked badge weeks,” wherein a defeat or two would cause papers to run tales adorned with pix of the club crest riven in two: he didn’t need to add that these “crises” rarely turned out to be any such thing.