Sound of silence provides no solace

PSST. Should I be talking to you? As you may have noticed, Old Trafford is in total locutory lock down.

To much public amusement, not a word has escaped our collective lips since the match – on Fergie’s insistence – and even though I am not a United employee, I feel uncomfortable breaching the Red omerta. Will I awake with a horse’s head in the bed, perhaps from one of the Rock’s less successful and therefore expendable offspring? (Frankly, I’d prefer it if it were Carrick’s head, but he’s unaccountably been allowed to sign a new deal).

Still, what an excellent excuse this is not to discuss the Anfield horror show. So let’s move on. Nothing to see here.

Ah. I see the editor has just pointed out to me – in words of one syllable, some of which aren’t in my dictionary – that he pays me to offer an opinion, not silence. You may say the same should apply to Fergie: part of his formal contractual duty is to communicate with both the media and the fans. He earns something approaching €6m a year to do so. And there have been very few days where our need to hear explanation and reassurance from our leader has been greater than it was on Sunday.

Losing at Anfield is always grim. But losing in the manner that we did was something worse. He should’ve looked it in the eye like the rest of us, not scuttled off into dudgeon to nurse a bottle and a grievance.

So instead of reporting Fergie’s words, the ABU sections of the media weighed in to fill the vacuum, the result of which has been two days when many Reds will have wished they had never opened a paper or switched on the radio. The irony is that I think Fergie, Phelan and co. could have found some good, combative things to say. For example: perhaps the late-morning drinking had got to me but, for the first 20 minutes of the second half, I fully expected us to score.

Berba, Hernandez and Giggs were looking purposeful; three or four good chances were carved out; and every Red knows that when United pull back to 1-2 in a game, you would bet everything in your pocket on us going all the way. Instead, VDS spilled it for the third clownish moment of the day and our humiliation was complete. Moreover, overall, there was no mystery: Rooney, Nani, Scholes and Carrick all had stinkers, three freak defensive errors occurred, and thus we lost to a very inspired and uniformly competent LFC side. These things happen.

It certainly does not necessarily mean the empire is at an end, as some would have you believe.

I say not necessarily, you will note, for reasons that you readers already know. We’ve been here before so many times this past two years with the same complaints: the midfield is a problem that’s not being addressed; spending hasn’t been sufficient; tactical and line-up changes are too frequent and cack-handed to engender Barca-style fluency, and so on. New contracts for Fletcher, Carrick and Anderson are not, in themselves, a good enough answer to the concerns expressed by fans all season long — especially as Carrick’s has barely been welcomed.

Moreover, there is the Rooney Question: I keep being told that Fergie is ready to sell him in June, and that their relationship is “very strained”. In summary: whatever silverware we pull off this year, there’s barely a Red alive who doesn’t think that this needs to be a big summer of market activity.

Watching Meireles run rings around us on Sunday, for example, was rather galling given that I was reliably informed he was our back-up midfield target choice after Ozil in August.

I’ve managed to avoid mentioning Nani’s disgrace, which shouldn’t have surprised us, given the number of times he has made us embarrassed to have to be supporting him. Yet he was, of course, unquestionably the player of 2010 at Old Trafford.

Remember when you could once love your best player without equivocation? Since the mid-Noughties, we’ve had Ronaldo, Rooney and Nani holding that supreme position, a trio who’d barely warrant a kiss between them.

Still, such is our desperate mood now that anyone who steps up to bury Arsenal or Marseille could have his wicked way with us. And, unlike Nani, we wouldn’t cry about it...