This week the Manchester United Defensive Injury Crisis did something no defensive injury crisis has ever done before. Twitching and sparking irresistibly into life, the Manchester United Defensive Injury Crisis stepped out of the shadows, no longer just an appendage chained to its treatment table, but instead fully empowered as a life-affirming, finally-living, Gloria-Gaynor-karaoke-prancing, enormous-trouser-waistband-holding-out entity in its own right.
Repetition can have a powerful effect. By the end of the week daily updates on the details of the Manchester United Defensive Injury Crisis had become unexpectedly gripping. The Da Silva twins with their matching groin-strains, flu-racked Nemanja Vidic, and the super-crocked Rio Ferdinand, whose recovery "has no timetable". There has even been some cautious talk that the 35-year-old Sol Campbell could be asked to come in and "do a job", presumably as a bespoke managerial hatstand or a slightly cumbersome occasional table.
Happily it seems likely this won't happen and that the Manchester United Defensive Injury Crisis will continue to lurch about the place unconstrained, in the process transforming itself into one of the most interesting things to have happened this season in the sweatily stagnant upper reaches of the Premier League. It has something freewheeling and topsy-turvy about it. You feel there might be cakes. Maybe Darren Fletcher will play the piano. Best of all is the spectacle of international midfielders playing as defenders, in particular the elegantly cosseted Michael Carrick, a stroller and a coaster, being forced to grapple and tangle in the sweatbox of central defence. Catching a glimpse of Carrick's flushed and mud-spattered face during the victory in Wolfsburg on Wednesday, it was hard not to love him slightly, to cherish his elegantly calibrated discomfort.
If footballers don't usually inspire this kind of protective affection, perhaps it's because they plough such a cautiously marked furrow. In cricket it's a major part of the game to see bowlers batting, the everyday comedy of people who have no great talent attempting to compete against the best in the world. Before rugby's makeover as a sport for preening giants you occasionally got to see a short fat bald prop pottering a few strides with the ball in open play, like a toddler taking its first panicky steps.
There is nothing like this in football, and perhaps this explains why people generally get so much crosser with – and also feel so wildly enraged, slighted and alienated by – footballers than they do cricketers or rugby players. We never get to see them flailing and frantic. The Manchester United Defensive Injury Crisis at leastfeels potent with giddy possibility. Even better, to the neutral it has the effect of making even a club of such burnished corporate perfection seem also somehow homemade and strangely likeable.
United usually provide us with, not exactly Tesco football, but Waitrose football – or Ocado football, a draught of homogenised excellence delivered directly to your puffy leatherette corner sofa. At home to Aston Villa today – and hopefully for the next few weeks too – we get to see them turning up at the door cradling an organic vegetable box, something crammed with oddments and mis-shapes: overly hairy parsnips, a basketball-sized celeriac, and a single unidentifiable purple thing that, from the right angle, looks a little bit like Michael Carrick's face frozen into a wholesome tuberous scream.