Manchester United Will Win The League This Season

I’m a massive pessimist. I usually expect the worst. In theory, I should, therefore, never be disappointed, but I always find a way. We should have won the league last season. We shouldn’t have needed extra time in Moscow. We lost the bloody League Cup the year we won the Treble.

Yet I have an overwhelming feeling that we are going to win the title this season. And it’s barely February. What’s come over me?

Some of it has to do with the fact that, deep into the freezing spring, we’re still unbeaten. Not quite in every competition, because our reserves put paid to that run in the League Cup, but I’m not counting that because a full strength XI would have won. Every question we have been posed, Arsenal, Liverpool, City, the lot, we’ve come away unbeaten.

Now I’m not one of these idiots who thinks going unbeaten is some sort of badge of honour of itself. It’s just about possible to go a Premiership season unbeaten and go down, and is certainly no guarantee of winning the title, especially with the number of games we drew in the early part of the season.

Going unbeaten, in itself, only becomes relevant when the league title is already wrapped up. But when you put together a streak as long as we have, it breeds confidence. As some of the players have mentioned, they have forgotten what losing is like and go into every game calmly expecting to win.

Another major factor is that our rivals can’t claim to be calm, in any way. They have all spent heavily on a striker this transfer window, with the exception of Arsenal, who have too much class for that. This is because they all panicked for one reason or another.

Chelsea because Didier Drogba has gone into terminal decline and Anelka isn’t interested anymore, so they went and got Fernando Torres.

Liverpool, rivals if not title rivals this season, splurged more than the £50m they received for Torres on the able Luis Suarez and Andy Carroll, a tall, limited striker who looks somewhat neanderthal.

Just for the record, other strikers that scored a few goals on their first season in the Premiership: Marcus Stewart, Kevin Phillips, Alun Armstrong, Dean Sturridge, Louis Saha, Andy Johnson. None of those are worth anywhere near £35 million, but their impact, and that of Carroll, is the same.

Our dear neighbours went and bought Edin Dzeko, someone everyone wanted (and who I would have liked us to sign, truth be told) but nobody was prepared to take a gamble on. They now have the most swelled striking ranks in Europe, but still can’t eat at the same table without fighting. Dzeko has so far repaid them with an equalizer against Notts County.

They’re all doing this because they know that unless they do something special, and we implode, the title is already gone. Only Arsenal aren’t scared, because they genuinely believe that they can win the league this season. And they can.

They won’t, because their players can’t last the pace of a season. They’re starting to get frustrated, as we saw the other day when Fabregas accused the referee of taking bribes. Every time they win, we do the same, and every time they drop points they see us slip further and further away. Plus, we still get to do them at the Emirates, which will be a further three points dropped.

So, with Chelsea and Man City making desperate last-ditch gambles on megabucks frontmen and Arsenal getting frustrated because they know that their customary end of season dip is just around the corner, can you blame me for being so optimistic?