Vintage year for a non-vintage team

HOW quickly some timely victories can change the big picture — especially when time is running out.

In this neck of the woods, we’re well used to hearing the national team manager intone the mantra: “show is show but result is result”. You mightn’t expect the manager of Manchester United to sing the same tune, and certainly not for public consumption, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Alex Ferguson is humming a version silently to himself as he contemplates the remarkable prospect of a second treble in a dozen years.

Even just a few weeks ago, it was the prize that dare not speak its name and while, of course, dreaming and doing are two very different things, United’s comfortable passage to the semi-finals of the Champions League means that the dizzying summit is suddenly in plain sight.

As one observer put it on Tuesday night: “the treble is creeping from its museum.”

If all that sounds a mite tentative in light of the scale of what’s on offer, it’s because Giovanni Trapattoni’s favourite mantra is acutely germane to the way United have gone about their business for much of this season.

Historically, from the Busby Babes through the European Cup-winning era of Best, Charlton and Law and, after the long years of championship drought, on through the flowering of Fergie’s Fledglings, United’s successes have been synonymous with swashbuckling style. When Bobby Charlton christened Old Trafford ‘The Theatre Of Dreams’, the notion was grounded in a kind of magical reality, however much the self-aggrandisement might continue to get up the noses of the unconverted.

The irony of this season, then, is that a vintage year for Manchester United could yet be fashioned by a far from vintage Manchester United team.

That they have been helped in their quest by the failings of others is incontrovertible, especially in the context of the Premier League race. Their two main rivals have found different but equally effective ways of shooting themselves in the foot — Arsenal with their usual trick of turning a silk purse into a sow’s ear and Chelsea through the interference of an obsessive control-freak who, in dispensing with Ray Wilkins, couldn’t help fixing something that wasn’t broke at the time. And, contrary to my own expectations, the dismal failure of Fernando Torres to inject fresh life into the team — another of the owner’s bright ideas — has merely served to add a sub-plot of personal anguish to the club’s general woes.

As for United’s beloved noisy neighbours — while hoping against hope they can exact a significant measure of revenge in the FA Cup today, all Manchester City have shown so far this season is that you can’t create champions overnight in a laboratory experiment, no matter how much money you throw at the research.

Yet even if this has been a season of diminished standards in the Premier League it would be churlish to cast United’s triple challenge as something engineered entirely by default. For a start, they have had to overcome significant internal difficulties, including injuries to key personnel and the hydra-headed Wayne Rooney saga which, for a time, looked as if it might derail his and perhaps the club’s whole season. But even as their title challenge stuttered, especially away from home, and consistency of performance — both individually and collectively — proved alarmingly elusive, United found ingenious ways to improvise their way out of trouble.

A glance at the Premier League’s leading scorers chart offers one significant clue: not only have United set the bar with four entries in the top 20 — twice as many as their nearest rivals, Chelsea — but the list is headed, on 21 goals, by Dimitar Berbatov, a player who is not even a guaranteed starter in the team. Add in contributions from Javier Hernandez (11), Wayne Rooney (10) and Nani (9) and it’s clear that, for a United team which pales in comparison with stellar line-ups of the past, many hands really do make light work.

In the final analysis, however, the hands which matter most are those which have been waved, often furiously, by the conductor. United might have been under-whelming on too many occasions this season but that the dips have never been allowed to corrode into a rot can only be attributed to Alex Ferguson’s unrivalled ability to concentrate minds. Whatever else has been lacking at Old Trafford, bedrock qualities like desire, resilience have not been among them. Strength in adversity is virtually a default setting. The result is that the only times heads drop at Old Trafford is when the boss decides to employ the guillotine.

Of course, theoretically United could still end up this season of fantastic promise with nothing to show for it or at least something less than the clean sweep which would ensure an unlikely immortality for a team which has never even hinted at invincibility. While only a Devon Loch-style collapse should deny them the title, the FA Cup is always harder to call by virtue of its special, one-off character. However, not least on the grounds that the loss of Carlos Tevez to City is far more damaging than the loss of Wayne Rooney is to United, the latter should today negotiate a passage to the final. Then it’s hard to see beyond another Red-letter day at Wembley even if, freed from the burden of realistic expectation, neither Stoke nor Bolton will be inclined to make things easy for the raging favourites.

But the toughest test of all lies in Europe and, so long as Barcelona remain in contention, I think the 2011 Champions League will simply be beyond this Manchester United side. And yet with 11 games to go in the season, the treble conquest is still up for grabs. By their own lights, an ordinary United are on the brink of an extraordinary coup — and that is the ultimate tribute, surely, to the manager who delivered the first one, with much more substantial assets at his disposal, back in 1999.