The Devil In Me

United wore black armbands on Saturday as a mark of respect to the recently deceased Macclesfield manager Keith Alexander. You only need to take a quick peek at JT’s absurd armband celebration to understand why he is the most dislikeable man in the universe. I am not going to argue that United’s players go home every night to polish their halos, but if Chelsea’s title campaign is distracted by the shenanigans of Cole and co. there will not be great mourning in the religious community methinks.

Instead, we can thank the heavens for the cool head of Paul Scholes. It was looking horribly like ‘one of those days’ for the majority of the match until Gibson’s superb (and unsung) through ball picked out the Ginger prince for our fairly fortunate winner.

Scholes prepares to battle the Na’vi. Berbatov seems to underestimate the peril.

It would be remiss if I did not say that Wolves were worth a point. Mick McCarthy put out a team to get a result and they were unlucky not to get it. He is unlikely to win a polarity contest in the company of people who venerate Roy Keane, but I have always admired his ability to look like a ferret and maintain a straight face. He also benefits greatly from not being John Terry, we all do.

For the most part I spent the early evening being cruelly reminded how ‘less good’ we are without our number 10. We are still an incisive team without Rooney but for most of the game it looked like we were trying to stab Wolves to death with a damp sponge.

That said, I thought Berbatov played exceptionally well, particularly with holding the ball up and finding passes to colleagues. Lamentably though, he cannot set himself up. Tremendous credit must go to both the players and Fergie for remaining focused on the games with the off pitch battle that is developing. If we are going to be handed slices of luck to go top of the league with nine games to go I’ll take them.

If the result against Wolves was a shot in the arm for our title ambitions then the San Siro game was about as sedate as a drug-induced rampage with a violently mood-swinging Iggy Pop.

I am hoping for a more relaxing evening at OT but being a United fan I know better. David’s return will, quite rightly, heighten the sense of delirium in the stands and Ronaldinho’s form at the moment will raise my blood pressure in all the wrong ways.

Rooney now wears a shirt with his average performance rating.

Milan are a proud club with a lot of seriously good players. We might well be playing Gary Neville against them. G. Nev is one of the great men yet, alas, no longer a great right back.

This is definitely my favourite time of the season, when things start to rock and roll a bit and the big matches stack up against each other. Let’s hope we can stay the course.

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