Better now than later, Ron

SO it turns out Fergie would ell Madrid a virus after all.Farewell, then, Cristiano: forgive us if we don’t wish you all the best.

Mind you, Ronaldo’s certainly done us one last decent favour; by jumping ship now, just nine days after the inauguration of Real’s new president, he has at least spared us another tedious summer of will-he-won’t-he speculation. United’s management now know right from the outset of the close season they need to replace him, and precisely how much cash they’ll be getting. After all, this could have dragged on until after the start of the new season, with all the chaos that would have entailed for our forward-planning.

Of course, some would allege that United have, cynically, known full well that this day was coming for several months now, of which more later. But the main feeling is relief, weirdly enough. All the suspicions have been confirmed, all the uncertainties removed, all the conflicted feelings resolved.

We’re the increasingly unhappy husband who welcomes the divorce petition with open arms, sad moment though it is.

Incidentally, when I say I don’t wish him all the best, that’s nothing personal. The same applied to David Beckham and Ruud Van Nistelrooy when they left; all have joined Real, a major geopolitical rival of United for the past decade and, hopefully, for the next decade to come. So were Ronnie to break a leg in three pieces in his first game at Bernabeu, one would rejoice at the damage done to opposition materiel, not at the personal suffering of a player one might feel has done one wrong. In any event, the realists among us have always known he could never stay with us forever, and have long since accepted that. Yes, there are the now-angry zealots who truly cannot handle anyone regarding MUFC as anything other than The World’s Greatest Football Club.

But the more sensible have always known that a Madeiran who loves the sun and who comes from a Madrid-supporting family is hardly going to be happy settling for 15 years of Salford rainclouds. Indeed, I am amazed he stayed this long. He gave us almost everything we could possibly ask for, in terms of on-pitch results, and stayed half a decade: as I wrote this time last year, he deserved his exit visa because he’d earned it.

When, to general surprise, United announced he wouldn’t be leaving last summer, many a newspaper ran stories that it was “understood” at Old Trafford that, in exchange for giving us one more year’s service, he would be let go 12 months later. This struck most of us as plausible, and as being precisely the kind of agreement that a famously brilliant man-manager such as Fergie might well have negotiated with the boy. Bar any overwhelmingly convincing evidence emerging to the contrary, that is what I believe has happened.

You may recall me reporting here back in March that Ian Ladyman of the Daily Mail and Danny Taylor of the Guardian – two of the best United reporters around – had broken what I knew to be an impeccably-sourced story that there was a secret deal in place to take Ronnie to Real in June. The story focused on the core agreement between Madrid and the player’s agents, but in fact the papers also had information that United were fully aware of the agreement, accepting of it, and thus de facto party to it.

The lads didn’t print this element at the time because of the furore it would’ve caused, not least as United’s official propagandists went out of their way to rubbish the stories in full-on Alastair Campbell mode. The reporters have doggedly stuck by their tale ever since and have now been fully vindicated. As I pointed out at the time, the logic of this story would point to Ferguson, Gill and Ronaldo all being fingered as, umm, experts in ‘economising the actualite’, given their frequent public statements all season long denying the player was for sale.

Safe to say I should repeat what I implore here often: do not believe anything that anyone in football ever says on the record. It really is just tomorrow’s chip wrapper.

So, now he’s gone, how much will we miss him? That partly depends on how wisely we spend the money, and how much of it the Glazers siphon off for their Visa bills. There’s also a perfectly coherent argument being made that this might actually benefit Wayne Rooney in particular, and Dimitar Berbatov to a lesser extent, for various boring technical reasons. Pudding-proof will come soon enough.

I won’t miss his flagrant cheating, or his off-field behaviour either. But if I see thrilling on-the-ball flair like that again in my lifetime, I’d be astonished. The divorce respondent’s verdict? He was an unfaithful wife – but, boy, was he good in bed.

* Richard Kurt writes a weekly column on Man United for the Irish Examiner.