TERRACE TALK: It’s time for cool heads after our week to forget

Pessimism has its advantages: you’re let down less often.

Last week, I wrote: “Everton are visiting next, which will be awkward. I’ll be glad when it’s over; I fear we’re in for a harder night than Moyes’ Everton usually gave us, anyway.” And so it proved to be, although don’t make the mistake of lumping Wednesday in with Saturday’s game.

The Everton match was a highly entertaining, end-to-end game that United could easily have won 3-0 (the two woodwork strikes and Evra’s wondershot). We were sucker-punched at the end by a move which exploited the fact that Valencia isn’t a natural fullback — and his being there at that moment was due to his being shifted in order to accommodate the type of attacking substitutions that everyone in the stadium had been demanding.

That gave Everton three points instead of the one they deserved, at best. Saturday, however, was a whole different ball game.

Three weeks ago, I wrote that “we’re nowhere near panic stations time yet. Believe me: when it’s time to run around yelling that one’s pants are on fire, I’ll be at the head of lynch-mob, frantically whacking my bottom.”

You’ll be pleased to know that my own bottom remains ‘hot’ only in the sexy sense of the word, laydeez: it’s not actually on fire, although I fancy I’ve seen some whisps of smoke rising.

But for many of the under-30s, it’s definitely flames and pitchforks time. In some ways, I can’t blame them. They were born into a United that was a Rolls-Royce machine, expected to win every title, fit to rank amongst Europe’s elite; this squad fulfils none of those criteria, and Da Yoof have no ulterior reference points that might help mitigate their rage.

Plenty already want Moyes out, and half of the players to depart with him; suggest that we wait until 2015 to judge more fairly, and they look at you with the blank incomprehension of a teenager who’s been told to make do with an obsolete smartphone until next Christmas.

In fact, at the same stage of 2001/02 season, we were equally dismal — and a point worse off to boot. Yet that side almost won the European Cup; a season needs to be allowed to pan out before you go mental. Even the Treble side was spluttering a bit until November ‘98, and only dug itself out after the fluke discovery that Yorke and Cole could work as partners (Fergie had originally planned to dump Cole to the perma-bench).

Nevertheless, there’s no getting away from the fact that this is a lot worse than then. Saturday was the first time I counted far more cons than pros on the Moyes account board at full time, no matter how generous I tried to be. Moreover, I also detected the first whiff of Wilf in the air. That’s Wilf as in McGuinness, the ill-fated successor to Busby, whose hair fell out after 18 hairy months in charge. Moyes’ alarming behaviour after the game, coupled with Rio Ferdinand’s burst of ‘lèse-majesté’ in a TV studio, hinted at a Wilf-esque loss of control. Any more of that kind of thing, and we’ll be talking about judgment day arriving in 2014, not 2015.

Saturday was akin to the moment the Germans broke through near Sedan in 1940. Suddenly, everyone sees the route to Paris is open, and starts to career about hysterically, making the task at hand ever harder. It’s one of those rare moments, when you’re my age, you’d like to allow life to fast forward and see how all this will look in retrospect one day.

Grasping at straws, perhaps — but it could be that, as in 1944, there’ll be plenty United fans in the future pretending they didn’t throw their rifles away this weekend. Yes, Moyes may yet prove to be a turkey. But even turkeys get until Christmas as a minimum. He needs to start showing at Villa Park that he wants to live for longer, or I’m afraid it’s going to be Paxo time.