United and Liverpool at the Gorse Hill

Having drawn a blank in each of the ticket ballots it was down to the exchange scheme on the club website. But unlike every other game of the year there wasn’t a season ticket holder to be found who would be doing something else on the day of the Liverpool game.

But it was that bicycle kick which fired the imagination: the way the ball, as it dropped stupidly from the underside of the crossbar into the goal, seemed to describe the look on Pepe Reina’s face as he watched it.

Well of course there wasn’t.

Manchester United Supporters Trust (MUST) were running a pub screening at the Village Inn, Trafford Park. They sent round an email - go to the MUST stand on Sir Matt Busby Way before 12.45, they’ll give you directions. There’d been something of an email blitz from the supporters’ trust in the days before the game, what with their million members project (163 430 so far!) and some cross-promotion with Fred Done which, we’re told, will keep them afloat. The green and gold colours are dropping away in the stands, though - or so they said on the telly.

The Gorse Hill began emptying about an hour before kick-off. Beside me, a woman fed her one-year-old as we followed the game on the screen. In the nineties, in a world so blind with optimism it was yet to elect Tony Blair, the Gorse was a vast drinking hangar with a big screen in which the terrace ethos lived and breathed. I remember Ryan Giggs smashing home a left foot drive at Maine Road to seal a derby victory and the joy being such that as the crowd surged forward the fruit machine was swept up in the fray, rearing and swaying drunkenly with all the menace that an out-of-control vending machine can impart in the midst of football crowd.

Somewhere, on Sunday, if only in the Gorse Hill of the Mind, those red army stalwarts were doubtless kicking in the fruit machine, dancing on the reels, stomping all over the prize ladder – if only in recognition of the feats of Dimitar Berbatov.

Could a United hopeful do any more to win over the crowd?

A hat trick against Liverpool hadn’t been done since Stan Pearson in ‘46, and not at Old Trafford since Joe Spence in ‘28. To throw in a self-created OHK, though, was almost to reach Cantona-like levels of fairy-tale-spinning.

As for the winner…for a player such as Berbatov (for whom questions of temperament and commitment are like clauses to his name) to beat his marker, direct the header, snatch the goal, seal the hat trick and steal the points in the dying minutes…this was to say something about big games and temperament to which there’s little comeback for the time being.

But it was that bicycle kick which fired the imagination: the way the ball, as it dropped stupidly from the underside of the crossbar into the goal, seemed to describe the look on Pepe Reina’s face as he watched it.

Not quite as freakish as Trevor Sinclair’s box-edge wonder from a few years back, perhaps. And maybe not as neat as the Pele/ Frank Worthington (take your pick) turn-and-volley trick. But a goal of the season contender, any year.

Six goals in five games sounds a bit more like the striker United fans thought they were signing on transfer deadline day, 2008. It’s been a rocky relationship ever since.

***

Over at the (reputedly waterlogged) DW stadium City splashed their way to a 2-0 victory over Wigan – their first in six attempts on the pie men’s’ patch – thanks to another line-leading performance from Carlos Tevez.

Tevez, who has responded to being made club captain by having his hair cut (having previously carried the look of a man unfamiliar with combs) now has 24 goals in his last 28 Premiership starts for the sky blues. Elsewhere in the City camp the picture is less rosy, however: Shay Given wants out again, having declared in an interview that he could be ‘Clark Kent’ between the sticks in training and still not get first team action. And in the bust-up which everyone but Manu knew was inevitable, Emanuel Adebayor has fallen out with Roberto Mancini after being accused of feigning injury.

Most worryingly, the team seem to be struggling to generate the traction needed for a title challenge - or a plausible tilt at a top fourth at least. The visit of Chelsea, this Saturday, offers the latest chance for City to steal the headlines.