Europe offers ideal escape route

IT’S been a unanimous response: ‘Move on. Look ahead. No dwelling. A Double to be done.’

They’ve all been on-message this week, the United players from VDS to Rio, so I propose to take their instructions to heart. It’s like Saturday never happened. There, there — doesn’t that feel better?

The fact that I haven’t left these four walls since Sunday morning, nor answered my phone, is entirely by the by. Move on, nothing to see. Apart from the chalk outline on the floor and lots of blood, that is.

At times such as these, how glad one is to be able to look forward to something out of the ordinary, of the kind that only European competition can provide. No disrespect to this weekend’s visitors Everton in overlooking the prior encounter, but if that’s not three plump points ripe for the plucking, then we really don’t deserve to harvest much in the way of silverware this season. One fervently hopes that it’s merely to be a run-out in preparation for the big one next Tuesday. (Ah, it’s working: a whole paragraph without seeing a vision of Yaya Toure.) Yes, never mind last Saturday, which in no way is rising up into every dream: it’s Tuesday that sees the biggest game of the season so far.

What a prospect — that extraordinary stadium in Gelsenkirchen, a three-day spring jaunt to Beer ‘n’ Sausage Central … and not a Bluenose in sight, no siree.

Not that I was even thinking of them at all. Like I say: moving on.

Underestimating Germans in the knockout stages has become a bit of a tradition for us, it has to be remembered. Dortmund ‘97 and Leverkusen ‘02 are classics of the kind, but we also fully expected to beat Bayern last season and in 2001. For some reason, when you take Germans out of that white national shirt that all we English frankly fear so much and stick them in their club colours, we suddenly appear to treat them as unsophisticated star-free hicks.

We even seem to forget that one great German characteristic, honed throughout World Cups and world wars: the never-say-die irreducibility. Three-nil up is often still not enough, as we found to our cost last season, something which still seemed to surprise so many in the stadium. Certainly, that ability to keep it together when under the cosh whilst you start to construct a response was something we could have done with on one recent occasion. An occasion which I have already forgotten and moved on from, yes indeed.

All that said, and with every warning about tempting fate in mind, surely it can be whispered that Schalke, objectively, are not as good a side as the four German outfits mentioned above? Those five San Siro goals do prey on the mind, but remember us putting seven past an excellent Roma to inspire fear throughout the continent? Instead, as we subsequently conceded five to Milan, it became the very definition of flash-in-the-pan. As one hopes will also be the case for the winners of the FA Cup. Whoever that might be; I forget who’s in the final.

United do possess one player who has an unimpeachable record in figuring out and scoring against Bundesliga defences: Dimi Berbatov. Nevertheless, for some reason, he doesn’t seem to be the name that most Red fans want to see first on the teamsheet for Tuesday. Perhaps it’s due to something that occurred last Saturday? You know, for such a supposedly historic occasion, it’s been amazingly easy to forget what happened, hasn’t it? Is it time for my pills, nurse? Ta. I’ll be fine in a few days. But I do wish you’d take off that uniform. No, no — I mean, it’s blue….”