You better believe it: time to create new Wembley legend

Terrace-talker Richard Kurt is asking fellow Manchester United fans to believe in the impossible

IT has been the least exciting, and most untaxing, European Cup run in our memory, but we do at last have the final we wanted: the world’s greatest team versus the world’s greatest club (or so we would herald it in Red Manchester anyway). And arguably, it’s at the venue many would have wanted too — the mythical stadium where both clubs witnessed their greatest moments, in 1968 and 1992.

We’ve certainly enjoyed the nostalgic revel during this week’s build-up which the choice of venue had prompted: the legendary images of Reds all in blue; Besty’s socks rolled down whilst a single arm points up in goalscoring triumph; Bobby’s tears and Brian’s kiddish delight; and Busby vindicated, and sanctified.

There was a typically modern bumpy moment earlier in the week when it transpired that Glazer United had ‘forgotten’ to invite the ‘68 heroes to Wembley — an oversight hastily corrected next day.

Let us hope the presence of the lads will also help remind us all of what the 1968 final itself actually produced on the pitch. For there was a match and a display to be proud of, in its dramatic narrative, late escapes, great goals and all-round satisfaction. The better team won, and — in extra-time at least — also showed what it could do.

Let us admit to our Red selves — sotto voce, if you insist — that this has been the one element missing from all Fergie’s European Cup exploits. He has previously taken us to three finals and we were second best in all of them — in two of them, quite embarrassingly so.

It’s easily and understandably, forgotten how awful Barca 1999 was for 89 minutes and how thoroughly the Germans outsmarted us. We have also almost airbrushed out of history the fact that, after the first good 30 minutes, Chelsea ran the rest of the Moscow final from their front foot. Rome, at least, is universally recognised for what it was — a disaster.

So, ludicrously greedy and overoptimistic a wish though this may seem, given we are playing perhaps the best team MUFC have met since 1957, here it is: may we be proud of what we do, rather than of simply what results.

United personnel, including Fergie and Rio, have been bullishly telling the press for the past three weeks that we intend to attack, to play fair and to be true to our traditions — as opposed to what would usually be prescribed against Barcelona: being defensive, tight, dirty and muttering ‘the winner takes all’, as would be Mourinho’s way.

Was it all standard pre-match PR bull, or genuine intent? We live in hope.

The editor of this very organ asks a good question, though, when he demands me to answer “are United in danger of being shown up on Saturday as, domestically, having simply been the best of a bad bunch?”

It’s a good question because it speaks to a lingering suspicion of overachievement that both observers and fans have shared throughout the season — one in which, you may recall, United were once cruelly dubbed The Crap Invincibles.

Chelsea, Arsenal and City have all, for varying reasons, failed to give us the kind of full-on fight that, say, Arsenal tested us to near-destruction with in 1999 — one which forced us to new heights.

Combine that with the almost embarrassingly easy path to the final — featuring the worst team we have played in Europe since the format changed (Bursa) and the worst semi-finalists ever (Schalke) — and the result is this: we are not quite sure how good we are. Saturday night, in front of billions, is hardly the ideal time to find out, is it?

And yet, and yet... United in the European Cup has always been a perverse experience. Because we never get to the final when we are at our very best; we are always, in a sense, condemned to be up against it. The greatest United team of all time never made the final, thwarted first by the greatest club side ever and then by Munich.

The 1968 winners, as many of them have cheerfully conceded, were not as good as the 1966 side that fell to a workmanlike Partisan in the semis. Even the 1999 team, superb and loved though it was, was recognised by us all as not being quite as brilliant as the 1994 side, which so ignominiously fell at the first in Europe.

So it has been this decade. United have been incrementally worse and less entertaining, every year from the winter of 2006 onwards. The side you really wanted to see in a final, and which deserved it, was the Roo-Ron-Tev 2007 vintage. This current 2011 side is, by common consent, the least impressive of any since then. Yet if this side triumphs on Saturday, it will have out-achieved them all. Just as the ageing boys of ‘68 outshone their illustrious forebears at Wembley.

So: Barca may be hot and deserved favourites — but you do just wonder whether, once again, United’s glorious, stubborn, idiosyncratic nature will reassert itself yet again.

“Believe,” as the Old Trafford banner says: after all, this club, and this manager, have always been capable of the impossible.