Terrace Talk: Man UNited - Endless misery takes us right back to the ’70s

There’s a childlike pleasure to be had, even at my decrepit age, to think one might be on the same wavelength as a Manchester United manager.

Two weeks ago, I pleaded here: “United surely need further recruitments in both the creative and striking departments.”

And I was tickled to see Ole use almost exactly the same words last week: “We’re going to recruit — we’re looking for some creativity and goals.”

But we are surely going to need a lot more than just a couple of players in January to save this shambolic outfit. Yesterday’s horror show, coming on the back of Thursday’s shocking snore-draw, suggests we might need a full-on apocalyptic day-of-judgment reckoning.

And I’m not sure Ole would survive it, despite my hopeful words last week that we were not quite back at April 2014 yet. (It’s more like March.)

The word in my ear is that an apoplectic Ole really did blast the players to kingdom come after the Arsenal match. “You wouldn’t have made the bench in my day,” was the alleged gist. But supposedly at least one senior player vocally leads a school of thought that Ole simply isn’t up to it tactically or strategically. It has to be admitted that yesterday’s abomination strengthens this school.

That doesn’t excuse the apparent lack of effort and commitment on display, but it might partly explain it.

We live in an era where primadonna players have to be coaxed to ‘buy into’ a managerial ‘project’; it doesn’t look like they’ve all paid their deposits yet.

Once again, we give thanks for the existence of international football, providing as it does this timely respite from the endless misery. Remember in the good old days last decade, when we cursed the intervention of Ingerlund & co because it might threaten a winning rhythm?

At this moment, we’d be quite happy to see a full overseas tourney take place. Lasting, say, six weeks. Anything to put off the day when we have to watch those wretched specimens step back onto the pitch.

Just to make matters worse, we all know what could be coming next for us. LFC, the one team you would not want to face at such a moment, are obviously quite capable of handing this lot the sort of beating from which they won’t recover.

And United are currently only two points from the drop zone. It’s almost comical, but you do hear some Reds muttering about us not being too good to go down.

Yes, it’s all back 40 years to the end of the 1970s, folks.

City the best team in Manchester; dodgy injury-time penalties and European Cups at Anfield; United mid-table and changing managers every couple of years; a lunatic rightwinger inside 10 Downing Street, and worries about the Northern Ireland border.

Funnily enough, as I broke via a UK newspaper the other week, United do actually plan on bringing back a 1979-style away kit next season. If only we could have some of those players too.

Replace Mata with Jimmy Greenhoff, Rashford with Joe Jordan, and give the armband to Martin Buchan and we might just get somewhere.

Of course, one problem they didn’t have at Old Trafford in 1979 was the club’s supposed best player not only being diplomatically injured so often but also on record as being a wantaway.

It did make me chuckle, if bitterly, to hear Ole say of another malcontent last week: “It was time for Romelu to go; what is the point in having players that don’t want to be here?”

Oh dear; bit of an own-goal there, Ole.

Then again, who really does want to be at Old Trafford at the moment? Fans I know have started to dread going; it’s bad enough being bored, but humiliated and angered as well?

The ones who watch our away games on telly only do so if a supply of extra-strong beer is guaranteed.

I watched an online discussion before kick-off yesterday where Reds were recommending to each other the best brews to cope with watching TV United: “Mate, this one’s 6.7%.

You’ll have forgotten the first half by the time the second kicks off.”

And there, perhaps, is the biggest difference between the United of today, and that of 1979.

Back then, you drank to enhance The United Experience; today, you do so to efface it.