The unspoken fear – what if Rooney gets injured?

HYPED-UP to the max in advance – thoroughly sated in the afterglow. If this season produces another 100-hour spell like last week, I’d be utterly amazed. Such irony that we witnessed so much that was pure United, whilst in the background you feel you can see the club’s very edifices crumbling.

Rooney’s last-minute winner against City was not only an ecstatic moment per se, it is already becoming regarded as, potentially, one of those key shifts we love to reminisce over – like Brucey’s header at Easter ‘93, or Hughesy’s semi volley at Wembley ‘94. They’re the moments that definitively mark an end to a dodgy period, and launch a scintillating golden run, strikes that seem to set aflame something within for the whole club.

You saw the result at the Emirates: a team that had staggered unconvincingly throughout autumn and the festive period suddenly oozed confidence and class, and combined flair with power in the approved United manner.

Of course, it’s too early to say just yet if last Wednesday will indeed go down as one of those moments. And, in the wretched Wenger’s defence, it’s also too soon to say if we have knocked them out of the running, as so many pundits proclaim. After all, the memory of their November humiliation at Chelsea, followed as it was by the mediacracy’s universal death-warrant dispatch, should serve as a warning – their immediate brilliant 10-match run silenced every sheepish doubter. They could do just that again. Though I doubt they will, admittedly. Chelsea are probably the greater threat now.

But the point is, as we have mentioned here time and time again, that this season’s remarkable twists repeatedly ridiculed every punter who tries to call it. Therein lies its joy. Those of a pessimistic bent, for example, only have to make one point to bring our foam-mouthed raving to a halt: “what if Rooney gets injured?”

Quite: and there were we thinking we were over-reliant on one man during Ronaldo’s heyday. Nowt compared to today’s Roocentricity.

Still, let’s not dwell on such possible horror, not least as we have enough to be grim-faced about as we contemplate the unfolding nightmare that constitutes Glazernomics. The sense of OT’s stands being on a green ‘n’ gold-garbed war footing is palpable. Saturday’s lunchtime visit from even more financially-benighted Pompey, being played on Munich anniversary day, is clearly replete with apt possibilities on the action front. Earlier fan disquiet about the propriety of “using” the Munich day for protest has disappeared in the wake of Ferguson’s disgraceful manipulation of Sir Matt Busby’s memory in his now-infamous programme notes last week.

Chief executive David Gill, in his usual cack-handed way, made matters even worse with his bad-tempered and dissembling display in a BBC interview on Sunday. He went even further than Fergie attacking fans’ rights to demo, thus helping to ensure that there will be even more protests – the cretin.

I am told there are rumblings about the football debt crisis in Westminster, with Downing Street meetings quietly arranged for next week; if some bright spark, Tory or Labour, eventually works out a way of making a vote-winning issue out of all this, we really will be into some fun and games.

Some of us, who prefer figurative bullets to hair clippers, pine for the return of the M.E.C., the Men In Black (balaclavas) who caused such mirth and mayhem in 2004/5. But on Saturday at least, neither red nor black will be the colours to wear. Dig out that frayed ‘90s away top, or buy one, or make one out of that Ireland shirt you no longer need thanks to Henry: green and gold will truly show which side you are on. This matters more than the mere football. So resist, or collaborate. And be judged accordingly.