We Can’t Appreciate Yet How Special 2007/08 Was…

Rio Ferdinand, not long ago, stated the Ronaldo-saga took away the spotlight from our Double success. He’s got a point yet he missed THE point.

The defender argued that the summer really should have been about basking in the glory of our stunning Premier League and Champions League triumph – and he’s right. It shouldn’t have been spent with fretting about Ronaldo.

But football is a game… no, a universe where the future is so much more important than the present. May 2008 is not yet part of the past, it is still the present in a sense. And the press, the opposing fans, the pundits focus on the future, on what will happen next season and in this sense the Ronaldo-saga was much more interesting than talking about our triumphs which everyone saw anyway.

We United fans were of course basking in the glory but it meant little in the grand picture. Rio could not possibly know that I kept watching the video of the Moscow final, of him starting to run forward at THAT save, alerting Michael Carrick who had his head in his hands…

But right now, even for me, there’s no sense of a historic achievement. Just disbelieving (yes, still) glee. The sense of history will settle upon us later, when sufficient time will have passed.

When we won the Treble, we were celebrating madly and rightly so. But back then we did not feel the weight of it. We did not really appreciate that we had witnessed the most successful season of the history of the world’s greatest club. Things of that magnitude are simply out of our comprehension for a while.

Later, looking back on this season we will realise, proudly, that this was a vintage year, another gloriously fantastic season. We will then know it it was the peak for this squad or if we rise to new heights (I think it’s the peak but prove me wrong guys). That will be the time where we can really evaluate what we have done.

Right now, it’s not time for history but for transfer rumours. That’s the way of the summer. And it’s difficult to talk about history when the set of players who have written it reported back to pre-season training.