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.