BECAUSE THEY CAN PLAY F'CKING GOOD FOOTBALL: PART 9

'The pirates of late season'; 'what will become of Anthony Martial?'; 'Donny does breakfast'; 'a late collapse versus Seville'; previous parts below...

ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE, SIX, SEVEN, EIGHT

cover: Paradisio Publishing

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through the days

late summer

autumn

winter

spring

the ingot coloured afternoons and eves

of May

this:

this

is

Manchester United

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De aap komt uit de mouw

(Dutch proverb: the monkey comes out the sleeve)

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PART 9

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page 104

Man Utd 2 Everton 0

a lovely simple scoreline

and win: a veritable battering; a pageant in red;

a dithyramb for Erik’s dudes in scarlet;

this paean 

our crowd

our people

admire take part in

are

the contest, and we them; as 

Sean Dyche’s decem-plus-one

are dropped as we wish:

1st: our late-season goal grabber Scott McT registers with a rifle past Jordan Pickford;

a photograph is taken and published by the club of Scott leaping through the air/renting it with a fist/sun a dappling cavalcade of climatic joy/all the faces inside Old Trafford a blur of action/of I-was-here/the stadium concrete hewn man-made histoire pinned against a cerulean skydome that 

stretches from here back to Newton Heath LYR Football Club in 1878

and a sphere of white light that edges towards penumbra status.

then

2nd: Martial comes on, 71 minutes in, and scores: his ratio is seven goals in 17 appearances totalling 798 mins this season at one every 117 minutes of this injury-blighted campaign,

but Marcus is forced off, he moves straight for the tunnel; how bad is he? 

is this another time to ask if this is the season over??

we have Sevilla on Thursday, Europa League quarter-final first leg

at OT

the return Thursday-week

the FA Cup semi-final against Brighton at Wembley on Sunday-week

and we go for the Champions League place, we are 4th, 3 points ahead of Tottenham and have played a game less and we have 9 left…