TERRACE TALK: Manchester United - Getting on with the game without Wayne Rooney
However, 72 appalling hours glued to a TV screen watching the Paris attacks and their aftermath?
As someone who is half-French, and who spends most of his week in France, from where I am filing this, let’s just say it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind as a diversionary substitute.
Football has a way of highlighting both its own absurdity, and yet also its singular capacity to rejuvenate even the tiredest of souls.
The very fact that the meaningless and pointless midweek England-France international took place, despite the dazed presence in the French camp of men who had been damaged by Friday’s events, was at once ridiculous and life-affirming.
I found myself thinking before kick-off “this shouldn’t be happening but yet I am glad it is.”
Old Trafford has long been used to the passionate swells of the Marseillaise but Wembley’s emulation did everyone involved proud.
So if there was one thing I wanted to see from United on Saturday, it was some signs of that life, as opposed to the moribund trudgery we’ve been experiencing for much of the past few months.
And despite the most unpropitious of circumstances — namely, an injury crisis that worsened as the 90 minutes progressed — United duly produced.
I say “despite”, but perhaps the word ought to be “because”; it was surely no coincidence that the absence of Rooney slowing us down and losing possession went hand-in-hand with an improved United display.
To cap it all was something we’d almost forgotten the feeling of: the full-on, last-minute, away-end ‘goon’.
Not a Red in the ground would have begrudged Watford a point — Reds are nothing if not fair-minded, despite our infamous bad temper — but the joy that greeted the winner was of an order that arguably hadn’t been experienced since 2012.
Amusingly, that very morning’s papers had featured Rooney’s agent promising us that Wayne “wasn’t thinking about retirement”, as though that were something for which we had all been pining to receive for Christmas.
The afternoon merely proved how unmissed he’d probably be.
The press had also echoed LVG’s “shape up or else” warning to Memphis Depay, who promptly responded with a smart goal and an afternoon of lively movement — albeit movement that evidenced only the most fleeting connections with his brain.
But he’s still young: That connection may yet come.
Not to get carried away, mind: It’s wasn’t terrible, but it still wasn’t very good. Van Gaal’s first reaction to going a goal up in any game remains the same, sadly, to turn down the volume and speed, and perhaps make a daftly disruptive substitution or two.
Nevertheless, here we are, more or less top of the Christmas tree, and facing the most improbable of eventualities next weekend, a top of the table clash at Leicester City.
Hmm.
Y’know, there’s a good chance that preceding phrase has never been written in this paper before.
Just as I doubt I’ve ever had the occasion to write “well played and thank you, Liverpool”, but after their astonishing demolition of City at Wastelands, it would churlish not to do so.
Taken in conjunction with Arsenal’s shock defeat, and Chelsea’s ongoing soap opera, United fans can be forgiven for grinning sheepishly at each other and wondering whether we might just go further than fourth this season, given LVG’s apparent good fortune.
PSV arrive on Wednesday for what ought to be a qualification-clinching evening — barring any unexpected and unwelcome interventions from our least favourite acronyms, namely LVG and ISIS.
That would cap five days of United hugely cheering us all up, which is something they haven’t done for a very long time...”
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