If you told us at the beginning of the year that we’d have two popes living together in the one house in Rome, one in the posh end and the other in the modest end; or that we would never ever be able to listen to Two Little Boys again and feel the same way about it; that we’d find out we’ve been eating horses; that we could never again watch Coronation Street and feel sorry for Ken Barlow in the way we used to when he was having his eye wiped by Mike Baldwin, or indeed watch the joyous end of a marathon without feeling any emotion other than joy, you would scarcely believe it.
2013 did not set out to be any sort of a remarkable year, but the four and half months of it that have happened so far have been filled with drama and intrigue and surprise — and this surprise continued yesterday morning when the sizeable proportion of the football-following public who follow Manchester United had their JFK moment.
It is probably fair to say that there is no manager in Ireland who has the same adoring following in sheer numbers as Alex Ferguson, so when his retirement was announced yesterday morning after a night of feverish anticipation on social media, it came as a real shock. There are a large number of United fans who have known only the glory years of the Ferguson era and they will only ever have known one manager at the club they support. Indeed, they are not alone, Ferguson is probably the only manager who some of his own players will have known, especially the long serving ones like Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes.
While a retirement is nothing compared to a death, there was a genuine sense of grieving among the many United fans I encountered yesterday. For more than anything else, the departure of Ferguson is more than just that. For many, it represents the end of a shared journey which brought them from the lows to the highs and to the really highs.
So the departure is much more than a farewell to Fergie — it is an adieu to the stage of their own lives where he brought them so much joy.
For the much older fans who remember what happened to United after Matt Busby departed, there is the knowledge of how a club can unravel, but that cannot possibly happen to a mammoth institution such as United, a club which was the best positioned in 1992 to take advantage of the huge wealth to be accumulated from being a global brand in the era of the Premier League.
As a fellow Celt, there was much admiration for Ferguson and what he has achieved because of his abrasive personality, and whoever follows him will no doubt feel the same affection. United fans are used to quickly adopting staff from rival clubs and making them their own and Ferguson’s successor will be no different, although the presence of a manager emeritus in the stands whose reaction will be caught by every TV camera will be an additional pressure for the new manager to bear.
However, for the moment, there is surprise and sadness for United fans in a year in which the unexpected is the commonplace, when sacred cows are being filleted and served instead of horsemeat, in 2013, a year of living dangerously.
