Don't know if anyone remembers this, but eight years back Gary Neville interviewed Noel Gallagher. At one point, he asked Gallagher whether he sincerely thought that City would still be where they were, at that point, ten years or so up the road. Whether consciously or not, it was condescending (I think it was fairly conscious). Gallagher understood the wind-up — he's anything but stupid — but didn't rise to the bait. The meaning of it was, “Yeah, you're sitting pretty now, but do you really think your club is big enough to consolidate and last the course?” And the unspoken assumption behind that was the mantra in Neville's mind (and so many rags' minds) “We're Manchester United”, i.e. we are just part of nature's masters, we are cream, and cream will always rise back to the top.
Historically, of course, looking at the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first as a whole (and as we should), that is arrantly false, as Gary James has so conclusively demonstrated, but let that point pass…
I'd like to dig that clip out and make Neville sit in a special hell chamber designed specifically for him, in which he'd be tied to a chair and forced to watch it on a loop tape. Because what's amusing is that ten years up the road (approximately), we are a bigger club, by quite some distance, than then; not only have we consolidated, we have moved up a couple of levels. And it occurred to me last night that United have now firmly become what Arsenal resigned themselves to being in the last fifteen years of Wenger's tenure, i.e. a top-four club, with the hope of maybe one or other of England's two domestic cups, to sweeten it from time to time. Their trophy is qualifying for the Champions League. A failed season is a season that they fail to do that.
I don't think they've the slightest chance of being champions for the foreseeable future. Arsenal are back in the mix, and must be taken seriously. Liverpool are not just going to go away, although I suspect they'll end up out of top four again this season. Newcastle probably won't do as well as last season, although I wouldn't like to bet on it. Above all, there is this terrible Behemoth standing in the way of all of them, called Manchester City Football Club. In short, the competition is absolutely ferocious, as it certainly wasn't during the years when United were winning every thing in sight.
Very, very slowly, United fans (some of them) are waking up to that reality…