Fergie’s Floggers can pull off another Lazarus-like miracle

THE current ‘Red Issue’ fanzine carries a rather apt cartoon of a dead horse named ‘United Squad’, collapsed just short of a finishing post labelled ‘19’, with a stern Fergie stood on its back trying to flog it into life.

Here’s the funniest thing of all, though: almost all of us, whether generally Fergiephobe or Fergiephile, tend to believe this is precisely the kind of Lazarus-like miracle he can be expected to perform.

Paradox alert: Fergie teams are often less than the sum of their parts, insofar as we have often complained in the past that we never seem to get the very best out of rich squad resources. And yet those very teams, that appear to operate most of the time on only eight out of 12 potential cylinders, are nonetheless capable of achieving results that ought to be beyond them.

Increasingly hopeless situations are turned and rescued in manners that, even with the benefit of hindsight, are hard to rationalise, so logic and logistic-defying were they. This is why some United fans can tell you within the same sentence that this team is one of the most underwhelming of the past half-decade, and yet that they believe it will pull off The Number Nineteen — and perhaps more besides.

Last Saturday, for example, wasclassic Fergie United.

We’re injury-wracked; we have not played well; the opposition have excelled themselves; we’re down to 10 men; and our fate lies in the hands of a disaffected striker who was publicly humiliated by Fergie just days earlier. No sensible observer watching this situation unfold would predict three points for United.

Yet amongst my colleagues, the majority were still muttering “we’re going to get something here” based on nothing more than a near-mystical belief — admittedly bolstered by incredible past experiences — that Fergie United will always find a way. Up pops Berb with an almost comedy goal, and a celebration ensues that has had us all drawing comparisons with the Macheda Moment from two years ago. Heh heh: you can understand why everyone hates us — we must be the greatest comeuppance dodgers since the banksters escaped being collectively lynched in 2008.

So we may well be limping to the post with an entire team’s worth of players currently injured but, again, you ask yourself: have Arsenal really got what it takes to catch us? And do they have the necessary luck, as Napoleon might’ve asked? Look at how propitiously this international break has fallen; at the very moment our rivals would have been hoping to see our resources finally give out over the course of a standard three-game-week routine, we get a lovely respite that Ferguson, Nani and others couldn’t help gleefully admitting was proper manna from heaven. Hell, we might even see the resurrection of Owen Hargreaves by the time we get back to action, if our sources are to be believed — now there’s an actual Lazarus moment. How ironic that would be, if Hargreaves was to join Berbatov to form the tag team to save this season, given Fergie’s reputed cordial loathing of the pair. Like I said: comeuppance-evasion is what we do. Hate us, go on: we love it.

Of course, there is the small matter of The Chelsea Charge, as some pathetic sections of the media have started to call it.

Undoubtedly three games against them in rapid succession are going to constitute a determining factor in the fate of the treble bid. We’ll certainly be sick of the sight of them by the time it’s over (as if we weren’t already).

A fair-minded observer might suggest that, frankly, they deserve a European Cup after the blatant robberies they have suffered in its pursuit over the past five years. But as Bolton confirm, there’s rarely room for fairness when Fergie’s Floggers are in the race.