Why missing Euro spot might not be the worst thing

MAKE a liar out of me, why don’t you? “Good at home, still ropey away”, was the gist of last week’s opus. I hope you placed your bets on the next two inevitable results to make up for Cheltenham!

In the state we’ve been in there’s bound to be a certain hysteria either way; wins eulogised to within an inch of their lives and defeats sparking supermarket panics in the sackcloth and ashes aisle.

Failing to even test Braga’s defence brought out the Jeremiahs in droves. The words ‘Carroll’ and ‘35 million’ were uttered with barely-suppressed incredulity.

The tendency to launch it confirmed every fear in the ground and the squad’s dimmer lights conclusively proved there’s a hard road ahead of us until we’re cut free from these ‘anchors’.

Flash forward three days and we’re by far the greatest team the world has ever seen — again.

Roller coasters are very jolly and everything but hopefully a fortnight’s break might cool us down a tad.

The same people who thumped their tubs about fourth place after beating Chelsea now do the same about fifth — Spurs’ European distractions will work in our favour apparently. There won’t be mounting dread that somebody else might ‘do an Istanbul’, dear me no.

Yet the debate continues on whether we’d be better off missing out on Europe altogether.

I find the idea of playing weekend football only next season extremely tempting, unless we get the squad fit enough to play twice a week.

True, the Europa campaign did not bear down too heavily on the first-choice players as they hardly ever featured but, on the whole, it’s been a spectre looming over what was bound to be a morose year.

People like Cole, Jovanovic and Poulsen are so transparently excluded from league games that they might as well be contaminated. That in turn made midweek fixtures a chore for the fans; expectations were subterranean and still weren’t met.

The Reds in Dublin would have been amazing, as Hamburg would have been last time, but it’s a long, tedious road just to reach one bestial excess.

So fair to say there was some murmuring before the Sunderland game, silenced abruptly by a decent, albeit slightly fortuitous, result.

There was much to admire. Spearing had easily his best game and Agger again proved his worth but even the most strident of loyalists couldn’t help noticing how poor the opposition were.

This was delicious vengeance for last season’s shenanigans.

Of course, everything was overblown. The challenge on Spearing was on the line and could have gone either way but, as with Carragher’s tackle (Jonny Evans? Never heard of him), any advantage we receive is greeted with excessive hype.

Our paranoia department regards that as a good sign; we are starting to irritate people again, hence post-match references to “beating 10-man

Sunderland” as if that made the difference. At one stage it looked like Bruce’s head might explode. 47,000 people checked their mobiles for the number of a decent laundrette. Strange; he thought it was all so very droll last time…

“A yard outside the box”, “the linesman’s 80 yards away” — you need to get that eye sorted out, pal.

Sunderland’s yahoos were already hyper thanks to Carroll, who at least has 160 minutes’ football under his belt and is a threat. But the real deal is Suarez. It’s just a treat to watch him take defenders on and Sunday emphasised the special tingle one gets whenever he’s got the ball.

Sunderland sold their top striker without bringing anyone else in and suffer the consequences. Eight months ago we were petrified of the same thing happening to us.

Braga, Northampton, Poulsen, Konchesky, Hodgson, Wolves at home, Blackpool home and away; we’ve had some nightmares this season, but when the book closes on it the goodbye to Hicks and the arrival of Kenny and Luis will obliterate the memory of other trivialities.