Far too close for comfort

GREET the new year, same as the old year, as The Who almost sang.

A team of trundlers gave us a little too much to worry about for comfort; Nani and Hernandez have smoothly picked up from where they left off in 2010; and poor old Gibson is still being labelled “the second-worst Irishman at Old Trafford.”

And as the double-dip recession threatens, a grim portent for the Gimps: empty seats wherever you looked. No wonder they’re scanning the skies for inbound Arabs morezealously than any Jews have done since 1973.”

Daily lessons we have learned during the 12 days of Christmas:

1. Snow and sub-zero degrees is festive fun for a day or two. But not when you fear it’s going to trap you in the West Midlands for a week inbetween away games. You thinkmissing the last bus out of town on a Saturday night is a cause for stabby, deep dread? Try wildest Birmingham and its indigenous “spear-chucking” Zulus: then count your 44 lucky stars.

2. Gary Neville can still cross a good ball when he gets forward.

3. Unfortunately, he now apparently needs a motorised wheelchair to get upfield fast enough to do so, and can no longer tackle without risking a penalty. Give it up, now, Fred, and give Fabio his due: you’re starting to give off that Old Man smell.

4. Anderson shouldn’t be asked to play too far forward, as he was at The Hawthorns — he needs to be able to see ahead of him in full Panavision to be effective. And that’s not leading to a gag about his humongous bellyblocking his short-range view.

5. Look, Berbatov cannot produce miracles EVERY game — and should also grow his hair long again, say all the frustrated wimmin.

6. Chelsea swagmen were selling snoods outside The Bridge. And then they wonder why we call them The Rentboys.

7. Hernandez is becoming really rather popular.

8. Carlos Tevez actually DID want to come back to O.T. three weeks ago: we eavesdropped over him and his henchmen in an Alderley Edge Italian restaurant going through our fanzine to gauge what the fan reaction to him was like these days. It was hard not to laugh when we heard the translator struggle to provide the Spanish for one of the descriptions we labelled him with: “sp**kbubble”.

9. We don’t need to buy in the transfer window because, according to Fergie, there is “no value” out there — and, besides, Valencia and Owen back from injury will be “just like signing new players”. Of course it will, Alex, of course it will.

10. David Beckham, who repeatedly said he’d never consider playing for anyone in England but United is thus apparently a complete fibber. Our 2003 branding of him was correct, then.

11. ‘The Crap Invincibles’, sadly, remains the very best label to apply to the United of 2010/11.

And finally, 12) Alex is now 69 years old — 69! — and yet repeatedly says he has no intention of retiring.

Woah, there. Doth he protest too much? I recently had a very goodinsider tip that the O.T. suits believed Fergie to be “very tired” and leaning towards earlier rather than laterretirement. “But Fergie wants to leave with a great new team in place,” he earnestly added, which frankly I found rather hard to swallow, given one might suspect that he would — like most great incumbents — adopt the De Gaulle attitude: “apres moi, le deluge.”

One of my sharper-eyed comrades noted last week: “Was it just me or did anyone else think Fergie was going to keel over at the start of the Sky post-match salad tossing? He was incredibly red in the face, then he went very quiet and seemed to struggle for breath or words for a moment. It’s coming, I tell you. One day he’ll go right in front of us.

And no doubt Liverpool will have the DVD on the street by the end of the day. “So far, so tasteless,” perhaps — although it has been my fear for a while that a Jock Stein exit is not to be ruled out.

Alex used to joke about having to be dragged out of the ground in his dotage, but he always used to add carefully that, having been there when Jock went, he knew that being dragged out in an actual coffin was one fate he would wish to avoid.

Ruminating over all this as I toasted the great man’s birthday that night, another email pinged in from my very best source: “Jason Ferguson’s been hawking the prospect of a tell-all DVD around various media companies — including Universal Artists — and apparently has now all but secured a deal for it. That’d presumably suggest a date has privately been set for SAF’s retirement, would it not? After all, it’s unlikely the financials would’ve been agreed merely for some indeterminable and potentially far-off future date.”

Hmm!

So: my New Year’s resolution to you is not to mention this subject again. But I’m truly beginning to fear he won’t still be here at O.T. on his 70th birthday. Unless the Qataris bearing gifts arrive, in the nick of time — in which case all bets are off: he’ll be here until he’s 90...