We're looking like ghost of Christmas past

One of my website’s punters, listening to the howls from thousands of Reds after Saturday’s defeat, suggested they should adapt the current Slade-inspired Old Trafford chant to this: “So, eff off Davey Moyes / we’re chucking out our toys / we go ‘wah, wah, waaaaaah’...”

And there was no escaping the sound of tantrums all weekend long, egged on by an understandably delighted media who love both novelty — United being a ‘bad news story’ after two decades of glory — and the smell of blood — “Moyes only 10/3 to be sacked next summer” grinned one paper.

My colleagues, who tend to be the older, seen-it-all types, always in a hurry to turn black humour onto any situation, were more phlegmatic. My mate Mike, whose first Old Trafford game was Best’s debut 50 years ago, ruminated: “I quite like the terrible uncertainty as to which United will turn up on any given day. It’s a blast from the past: like being in a TV series called Life On Moyes’... Arf!

Life On Mars was set in the 1970s, which Saturday effortlessly conjured up, because it was the first time West Brom had beaten us here since December 1978. That was one of the most memorable games of my youth, and one of the greatest matches I’ve ever seen. The United manager that day was Dave Sexton, and this column has previously pointed out some of the spooky similarities between the start of his reign in 1977 and today.

We had all expected to be comparing Moyes to Wilf [McGuinness] but Fergie’s enforced, and then deliberate, absences from both Old Trafford and Carrington hitherto have invalidated that. Instead, it’s Sexton’s cautious approach, unsure touch with inherited players, and tendency to oversee roller coaster sequences of bad defeats/stirring triumphs that ring the biggest historical bell. From Leverkusen to City; from Liverpool to West Brom; it’s like the Christmases of 1977-1979 all over again. So what next, indeed? Is Ukraine going to be Moyes’ St Etienne ‘77?

I’m not going to waste words on Saturday’s actual football, as only one would suffice, and it can’t be printed. Moyes’ selection and mid-match decision-making didn’t work this time, clearly. But he did get one thing right this week — apart from the way he ran the Liverpool match — when he warned us after City that there might be more “bad days” to come. Right to predict them, and right to warn us, for there are some wailing Reds out there who need to be reminded of some home truths.

To that end, my very old friend and colleague Smiley, who can usually be relied upon to sum up any crisis with good sense, duly reminds them: “We’re not actually that great a side any longer, and the current manager has had virtually no influence over that situation having arisen. The football is, in the main, pedestrian and the personnel, in the main, uninspiring. There’s nothing new in any of this, though, so why some people expected Moyes to start ripping up trees from day one escapes me. Expectations just need to be adjusted and a certain sense of reality needs to prevail in the short term.”

Amen to that.

Just 11 days after that 1978 West Brom defeat, the ill-fated Jim Callaghan came home from the Caribbean to a strike-crippled Britain and was misquoted on the front page of the Daily Mail asking: “Crisis? What crisis?”

Old Trafford wags quipped that he clearly couldn’t have been talking about the then-beleaguered Sexton.

But this really isn’t a crisis — yet. It remains merely a large blip — albeit one that’s thinking of trading up. So keep singing the original Slade tune, and keep the toys in the pram for when they may really be needed. Christmastime would be apt as well as right, wouldn’t it?“