TERRACE TALK: Man United - Our luck takes turn for the worse

You don’t always have to wait a season for “luck to even itself out”, as the old football cliché goes.

Sometimes, a week will do it, as some Reds may have sourly reflected last night.

However hard done by we felt — having been cruelly reduced to 10 men so early, and then conceding just as we appeared to be taking strategic hold of the game — Watford fans might justifiably argue it was karmic payback for Wednesday night.

Certainly, a recidivist United could easily have been down and out by half-time against a lively, defence-stinging Hornets, as grim memories of the 1978 League Cup shocker flooded back for your correspondent. More ancient flashbacks followed on Sunday for some: we hadn’t lost at the Hawthorns since 1984.

But, oh, to be back in 1984! Robson, Whiteside, and Hughes rampant; exciting Big Ron in charge; standing in the terraces and fighting in the streets... excuse me while this ageing wreck wipes away a tear for his lost youth, teeth and hair.

Most important of all? The competitions we played all mattered, and had integrity. League, FA Cup, League Cup, Europe... every match counted to us, and every trophy could hold its head high.

Today, we can make no such claim, after the debasement of the cups and the deforming of the leagues. And important though the Watford and West Brom matches may have been for the season’s narrative, they weren’t the story of the week for me. No, that was the sound of a particularly heavy further nail being driven into football’s coffin, as The Sun caught some of the English game’s top bosses scuttling away from a secret meeting.

United are heavily implicated in this nascent plot to create a European superleague, and not just because anything of the sort could only happen with the backing of the country’s biggest club.

It was always felt by those opposed to the Glazer takeover that their financial plans would only pay off for them if they could achieve two presumed long-term aims: control of their own pay-per-view income, and more of a US-style “closed market” at continental level. The current alleged plan would bring both those things closer still.

Moreover, the public face of the operation, New York big cheese Charlie Stillitano, has Old Trafford links.

I am not going to bore you with a lecture about the details and evils of all this — not least because I don’t have the requisite 2,000 words space — although it can be summed up in one phrase: Yankees Go Home.

Anything that smacks of the farce that is the US closed sport market must be resisted.

It is the artificial antithesis of genuine competition, being merely a clever method for soulless plutocrats to extract the maximum amount of money from gullible adherents.

Thank God, then, for Louis Van Gaal. (Did I really just write that?) When he rather bravely emerged the day after the story broke to condemn the idea, he did at least show that, for all his faults, a genuine sportsman’s heart must still beat under all that blustering blubber.

Normal service resumes next week, when we shall pick over the bones of whatever the SuperEagles will have been reduced, or have reduced us, to (delete as per mood applicable).

Enjoy it while it still matters: for if the day comes when the phrase ‘European qualification’ no longer pertains for the bejewelled likes of United, how much point will remain to much of this weekly lark?