Sick as a parrot

Sick as a parrot


Edwin McGreal

I’M sick. Sick as a parrot. Being in Cosy Joe’s until two in the morning probably doesn’t help but there’s no doubt about it – if it was Ryan Giggs lifting the Champions League trophy last night instead of Carlos Puyol I wouldn’t have half as much to complain about.
It’s amazing what sport can do for your state of mind. This time last year I was in Australia and, after United’s glorious victory over Chelsea, I could gladly deal with Aussies ringing the call centre I was working in to complain about their pension plans.
Today if someone did so much as ask me for directions to Achill I’d be liable to eat the head off them. Sickened.
And do you know what annoys me most? The crap about United being outclassed. Don’t get me wrong, Barca were good, but United were the authors of their own downfall. Too many players simply didn’t play.
Don’t tell me Wayne Rooney was outclassed. He had a stinker.
The annoying thing is United went down without so much of a whimper. That is what really sucks. Barcelona were allowed to toy with them. To pass the ball around like a father holding the ball over the head of their young son. It was embarrassing at times.
United just strolled around after them. Only Paul Scholes and Nemanja Vidic even bothered putting a tackle in. George Hamilton lashed out at Vidic for his late tackle. At least he cared enough to be frustrated George, that’s what we wanted to see. It was that docility that really annoyed me.
And, while hindsight is a great thing, the logic of starting a team that included Park and Anderson and left Berbatov and Tevez on the bench does look frightening in retrospect.
And Barcelona were good – don’t get me wrong – but they still only played at about 70 per cent. Last night was a huge disappointment from a point of view of any neutral.
We just never turned up and you could go and analyse the whys and hows of that all day but get nowhere. League champions we may be but the season is not a satisfactory one. How Liverpool would love to be in a position where they were complaining about winning the league.