This week the Manchester United Defensive Injury
Crisis did something no defensive injury crisis has ever done
before. Twitching and sparking irresistibly into life, the
Manchester United Defensive Injury Crisis stepped out of the
shadows, no longer just an appendage chained to its treatment
table, but instead fully empowered as a life-affirming,
finally-living, Gloria-Gaynor-karaoke-prancing,
enormous-trouser-waistband-holding-out entity in its own right.
Repetition can have a powerful effect. By the end of the week
daily updates on the details of the Manchester United Defensive
Injury Crisis had become unexpectedly gripping. The Da Silva twins
with their matching groin-strains, flu-racked Nemanja Vidic, and
the super-crocked Rio Ferdinand, whose recovery "has no timetable".
There has even been some cautious talk that the 35-year-old
Sol Campbell could be asked to come in
and "do a job", presumably as a bespoke managerial hatstand or a
slightly cumbersome occasional table.
Happily it seems likely this won't happen and that the
Manchester United Defensive Injury Crisis will continue to lurch
about the place unconstrained, in the process transforming itself
into one of the most interesting things to have happened this
season in the sweatily stagnant upper reaches of the Premier League. It has something
freewheeling and topsy-turvy about it. You feel there might be
cakes. Maybe Darren Fletcher will play the piano. Best of all is
the spectacle of international midfielders playing as defenders, in
particular the elegantly cosseted Michael Carrick, a stroller and a
coaster, being forced to grapple and tangle in the sweatbox of
central defence. Catching a glimpse of Carrick's flushed and
mud-spattered face during the victory in Wolfsburg on Wednesday, it
was hard not to love him slightly, to cherish his elegantly
calibrated discomfort.
If footballers don't usually inspire this kind of protective
affection, perhaps it's because they plough such a cautiously
marked furrow. In cricket it's a major part of the game to see
bowlers batting, the everyday comedy of people who have no great
talent attempting to compete against the best in the world. Before
rugby's makeover as a sport for preening giants you occasionally
got to see a short fat bald prop pottering a few strides with the
ball in open play, like a toddler taking its first panicky
steps.
There is nothing like this in football, and perhaps this
explains why people generally get so much crosser with – and also
feel so wildly enraged, slighted and alienated by – footballers
than they do cricketers or rugby players. We never get to see them
flailing and frantic. The Manchester United Defensive Injury Crisis
at leastfeels potent with giddy possibility. Even better, to the
neutral it has the effect of making even a club of such burnished
corporate perfection seem also somehow homemade and strangely
likeable.
United usually provide us with, not exactly Tesco football, but
Waitrose football – or Ocado football, a draught of homogenised
excellence delivered directly to your puffy leatherette corner
sofa. At home to Aston Villa today – and hopefully for the next few
weeks too – we get to see them turning up at the door cradling an
organic vegetable box, something crammed with oddments and
mis-shapes: overly hairy parsnips, a basketball-sized celeriac, and
a single unidentifiable purple thing that, from the right angle,
looks a little bit like Michael Carrick's face frozen into a
wholesome tuberous scream.