Squeaky bum time not all that squeaky

IT’S easy to get too blasé about the success we’ve had in the Fergie era; we take for granted the cascade of silverware and our perennial status as The Team To Beat.

But it still impressed me to realise this morning that this is our 20th successive title-chase.

Never mind your ‘classic Liverpool’ of the post ‘76 era, or Revie’s Leeds: there is no club in English history who can match this record of consistency, and of hardened experience of what we have all come to know as ‘squeaky bum time’. (How fitting that is was Fergie himself, the ultimate expert in this matter, who coined that deathless phrase).

As we stand this morning, we are four games from the post and on the brink of what we have all come to know simply, but portentously, as ‘Number 19’. But it’s thanks to the very first of these 20 successive chases, back in 1992, that we know not to count any chickens yet, even though their beaks are pecking through the shell as we speak. That April, too, we had a moment like this: in pole position, four games to go, and another kind of immortality awaiting — the first title in 25 years.

Three crushing defeats followed, and one of the five greatest-ever United football traumas was the result.

Nevertheless, that hasn’t prevented a subtle psychological shift taking place over the weekend. Before Hernandez’s divine intervention at the post on Saturday, most Reds were still using their mental calculation machines for one sole purpose: working out the dangers to our title, and juggling the way different results secured by us, Arsenal and Chelsea might factor in to the final reckoning. Now, tempting fate though it may be, the calculations have a different objective — figuring out which game might be ‘The One’, the scene of the ultimate coronation that would consecrate the champion of champions.

I love these different stages of fighting for a title. Early doors, it’s what is now the easy jump, “is this a team that can seriously challenge for the title?” Let’s not forget that, for most Reds, we remember many a year from the Bad Old Days when this was a question whose answer could never be presumed.

Later, usually sometime between Christmas and the spring, there’s the concretisation, you’re pretty sure you’re going to be “there or thereabouts”, as the classic cliché has it. You get to late March/early April, and you’re looking for the moment when, hopefully, the other great cliché — “it’s ours to lose” — can come into play.

Finally, as the post comes into view, the moment when it becomes worthwhile to start metaphorically plotting out every possible result on a graph and applying your slide-rules.

And the final, favourite cliché of all arrives in your mouth, “it’s time to put the champagne on ice”.

It never gets old, this routine — nor will it, even if it continues for another 20 years.

Some of the sting has gone out of Saturday’s match, thanks to Arsenal’s utterly predictable bottling in recent weeks, but it’s still a rendezvous fraught with danger to kick off a veritable week of destiny in the league and European Cup. Again, we all know from bitter experience what can happen during such intense spells of top-level combat: after all, we only need cast our minds back 12 months to the horrors of the Bayern-Chelsea one-two, a hundred hellish hours that deprived us of Rooney, and thence a double.

Losing Rooney for just 90 minutes has already cost us the treble this season — thank you, Trevor Brooking and the FA — so we need no further reminders of how a single player’s loss can derail a whole campaign, even at this late stage. We shudder to recall Vidic’s poor shape costing us the European Cup in 2007, for example.

Some players matter so much that no amount of squad-building can compensate: these examples serve to keep our feet on the ground as we enter this decisive week. And yet, and yet... we’ve all been playing Fantasy Coronation during this royally exciting week. Making Chelsea smell the glove at Old Trafford has its backers; others want the final-day drama of necessarily beating Blackpool. Me? I’ll plump for Blackburn away. FA Cup final Saturday, and the chance to spoil City’s biggest moment in 30 years on a day that’d already have LFC in mourning (with good cause, for once). Simultaneously hugging each other in glee whilst slapping our enemies? That’s a contortionist Red’s victory dance to relish indeed.