Blue dawn can’t take from the joy of 19

I KNOW it’s juvenile but perhaps my favourite moment this past memorable weekend was hearing BBC Radio reporting live that a stunt mounted by the Red Issue fanzine had succeeded perfectly.

Brave operatives infiltrated the Anfield Road End at the Liverpool match and unfurled a banner that simply stated: ‘MUFC: 19 Times’. Now then: howsabout a Scousey minute’s silence to mark the death of their reign? The lads involved had a getaway car running outside, and managed to make off without a bruise to their bodies.

There’s a metaphor for United’s behaviour away from home all season long, then. And Saturday was more of the same, fittingly — yet another bewilderingly inept display, rescued in trademark modern MUFC fashion with a late home heartbreaker with a whiff of controversy. Not that anyone cared about anything beyond the point this secured, nor do we think the display signifies anything for the approaching Wembley final.

Instead we were just happy to yell ‘19’ all afternoon, mark that happiness by matching titles pint-by-pint, and all the while studiously ignore the cavorting blue shirts flickering on the screens in pub corners.

Yes, yes, we accept we didn’t quite manage to overshadow City’s final.

“What a day for Manchester,” you could even hear some older Dad-types reckon, whose own fathers would doubtless have greeted the 1956 precedent in the same cheerful manner, back in the days when thousands would genuinely go to Old Trafford and Maine Road on alternate weeks.

Curiously, when the fateful whistle sounded at Wembley, I really don’t think it hurt even younger Reds as much as we thought it would. As they say in the financial markets, it had already been priced into the (emotional) share value. Sensible Reds have known from the start of the Arab annexation of east Manchester that this was not only coming, but was loomingly imminent, and this week we have balefully but somehow acceptingly watched them hit their two great targets — a trophy, and European Cup entry.

The Brave New World is here, and we’re already up for facing it. Such is the effect of reaching the Barca final, I suppose; I doubt we’d have been quite so sanguine had we finished 2011 empty-handed.

If we are indeed already resigned to the fact that City Are Back, are we also up for the other great return that 2011 appears to be witnessing? I refer, of course, to Liverpool, who appear to have settled on Dalglish being the man to take them back to, well, The Dalglish Era. Winning the 19th at the very moment the LFC revival seems to be underway is exquisite historical timing, doubly so given the part Kenny played in establishing that original 18-7 lead as both player and manager.

When my Docherty Generation started out as supporters, the clubs were dead level at 7-7; Shankly then inched one ahead in 1973 but, when we roared out of the Second Division in 1975, we felt we were experiencing a glorious rebirth, just as Liverpool are enjoying today.

And when we were toe-to-toe with Paisley’s men at the top of the table in the autumn of 1975, and full of Title-tilting confidence, no-one could have imagined in their wildest nightmares that what we were setting out on was not to be a proper, relentless, epic contest over the next decade and a half, but instead something more akin to a Scouse procession.

Ten titles in 15 suffering years later, they could then turn to us and smugly challenge: “come back when YOU’ve won 18,” as the infamous Anfield banner put it. The truth? No-one then believed we ever would.

But Fergie’s even gone one better. And that is why, whatever Wembley has in store, and despite so much football like Saturday’s this season, 2010/11 will rightly be celebrated for as long as Manchester United exist.