Wild and Wacky Premiership Predictions

Irish Voice Sport

Wild and Wacky Premiership Predictions

August 10, 2007

The Cathal Dervan Column

THE brief from the main man on the Star Sunday sports desk was a simple one. Write 800 words on who will win the Premier League and why. Predict the winners of all the major competitions across channel when English football returns this weekend. And offer a few humorous predictions while you’re at it.

Simple? You must be joking. Humor? Yeah right.

This is what I offered — firstly Roy Keane will be pictured walking his dog in his new role as Sunderland manager during what will be a difficult season for the Wearsiders. How’s that for humor?

Incoming Manchester City manager Sven Goran Eriksson will probably have an affair, and even more probably with a Swedish television presenter. God, they’re still laughing at that one.

David Connolly will leave Sunderland? Absolutely right if not at all funny. Harry Redknapp to resign as Portsmouth manager during the season? Has a chance that one.

And then the funniest of them all according to a man in the office who managed to berate me before the paper had even hit the streets on Sunday morning –- Alex Ferguson to retire as Manchester United manager with a second successive title in the bag.

The sub-editor, a Liverpool fan it has to be said, almost fell off the chair laughing when he read through that theory on his computer screen. He reckons Liverpool have more chance of winning the Premier League as it is to be known from now on. They don’t like the Premiership moniker anymore apparently!

Another colleague believes Chelsea will get their trophy back, while my eldest son Cillian is still hanging onto the belief that our beloved Arsenal, with Eduardo Da Silva in for Thierry Henry, can win the first league crown of the Emirates Stadium era.

They are, of course, all entitled to their opinions as are those of you who will no doubt write into the letters page of this organ to have another laugh at my latest pre-season predictions.

I’m not for shaking. I really do believe that Manchester United will win the league again this season and that Alex Ferguson will celebrate his sweetest victory yet over Jose Mourinho by announcing his retirement.

Here’s why I will not lose that conviction. Carlos Tevez, the great Argentinean striker now free to sigh for United from West Ham, will provide the goals that will ensure Ferguson’s final season is a successful one.

Once Tevez finally arrives then United will top the new league and Chelsea will finish third. Sandwiched in between them will be Liverpool boss Rafa Benitez but only if his new American owners see promotion to runners-up spot in the league as progress.

Chelsea magnate Roman Abramovich won’t be as forgiving when Mourinho is usurped by elder statesman Fergie for the second year in a row, so Portugal’s greatest living person, in his own opinion that is, will be exiled to football’s equivalent of Siberia before the Sky and Setanta cameras have stopped rolling.

By the time he collects his exit papers Ferguson, about to begin his 21st season in charge of all things Red at Old Trafford, will be celebrating the end of his illustrious career as United boss.

Ferguson will go on his own terms and of his own volition next summer. He will not, as he proved with a dramatic u-turn on the road to retirement a couple of years ago, be dictated to when it comes to the timing of his P45.

But even the most fiery Scot of them all will know that this, finally, is the right time to take his leave of Old Trafford. With another title in the bag that much will be beyond doubt even in the house of Fergie.

At an age when the free bus pass is already in the back pocket, Fergie can do no more for United than win one more English title and one more European Cup before bringing the curtain down on a career that almost bit the dust before he had really got going in England all those years ago.

This is the season for Fergie to deliver one more title for the Glazers, though I doubt his current United squad, even with the addition of Tevez, Nani, Andersson and Hargreaves, will be good enough to thwart Barcelona’s team of all the attacking talents in the Champions League.

Instead they will have to content themselves with another Premier League crown and do their best to take the Catalans to the wire in Europe.

Chelsea’s Mourinho will be the biggest loser of all. And he has no one to blame but himself.

When he took the job and openly challenged Ferguson’s status as the greatest manager of the modern English game, Mourinho lit a fuse on the time bomb that will ultimately destroy his own claim to that title.

Ferguson has been rejuvenated by the arrival of Mourinho into a scene that had become stale by comparison with the back page headlines of the three years since The Special One first landed.

Where once Fergie contemplated early retirement, he now plans out the best ways to rub Mourinho’s nose in it. It took him three attempts to do that for the first time last May, having sat through a Chelsea coronation a year earlier at Stamford Bridge, but right now Ferguson is the top dog once again.

The Cantona-like signing of Carlos Tevez — in spite of all the controversy it will be the best bit of business done this summer — ensures United will be the champions of England next May — without any shadow of a doubt.

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