Time to get over ‘no Wayne, no gain’ mentality

THERE is a certain grim fascination to be had in the examination of a building collapsing around your very ears.

If tonight doesn’t go well, we will possibly come to look back on this past eight days as the swiftest and most compact demolition of an entire season’s work in recent memory.

Bayern-Chelsea-Bayern: three wrecking-ball swings and down we all fall (Please don’t mention the League Cup to me at this point, as a punch in the mouth may offend).

But the dramatist would find something compelling in the sheer Roocentricity of the whole saga. It was painfully exquisite, even, that within mere seconds of his being felled in Bavaria, the entire Red edifice began to crumble, as though the fallen giant had been holding up all four walls all along.

After all, had we come away with a 1-1 draw, and with an uninjured Roo, we’d have been utterly cock-a-hoop going into Saturday. Chelsea would’ve been dispatched, Bayern finished off, and the champions-elect flight-booking for Madrid would have begun.

Instead here we all are, collectively fretting by Wayne and Colleen’s bedside as we finger our grapes and rosaries, prodding his foot every few minutes to see how it’s responding.

I had to laugh bitterly at the predictable way last week’s script played out, though.

1. National mass hysteria as the World Cup’s White Pele is under threat.

2. National relief a day later when the phrase “two or three weeks” is deployed. (Ingerlund fans missed the unwitting joke that’s in that phrase for United fans, weary of past Neville and Hargreaves saga bulletins).

3. Every single newspaper carries stories or player interviews denying United are a one-man team, and promising a demonstration of that against Chelsea.

4. Every single newspaper then decides to pile almost the entire responsibility for succeeding in that demonstration on poor Berbatov’s slim and shrugging shoulders.

So: the set-up was as embarrassingly obvious as any from a 70s sitcom.

Cue defeat, and realms of goldfish-memoried comment about us being a one-man team and Berbatov being both useless, and quite possibly the Antichrist. Sigh.

I shan’t tarry any longer on Chelsea, save to point out that this column’s readers will have recognised there was nothing new under the sun to be seen: you can’t play a formation like that with Berb at its point; our kaleidoscope-selector midfield is – by dumb design – the most inconsistent we’ve had since 2005’s darker days; Gary Neville mustn’t get a new contract, no matter what the dailies Mirror and Mail reckoned last week.

And Mike Dean is currently the worst ref in the land – though one must admit the scoreline would have been exactly the same had all his incorrect calls been reversed.

Oh, and most obvious of all: the Spud Faced Nipper is the most talismanic player and leader we have had since Cantona circa 1995.

As I write on a Monday, there was talk of Wayne being miraculously rushed back to face the Jerries, with the implication that he could extract us from their pincered clutches in a Dunkirk-style coup de theatre. That is, of course, what we are all praying for – the most unexpected Easter resurrection in about 2,000 years.

But with those hopes dashed yesterday, the onus now falls on Berbatov to lead a Nipper-free team to victory: can you imagine the transformation this would engender in Berbatov, the least confident confidence-player of all?

Not to mention the boost to the team, whose protestations last week about their non-reliance on Rooney convinced no-one? I recall the run-in of 1994/5, when a team so dejected to be deprived of Cantona regrouped and fought magnificently until the bitter end: it remains my favourite season following Ferguson’s United because it showcased our greatest club quality – we never say die.

An apt Germanic tinge for tonight.