Two weeks have passed since Bebé was announced as Manchester United’s latest signing of the summer but the decision to invest £7m in the unknown Portuguese striker got even more intriguing this week when he was overlooked for selection for a reserve game against Manchester City. Bebé arrived in England amidst unsubstantiated reports that he had once turned out in the Homeless World Cup, but United’s coaching staff decided that he was not yet ready even for a place on the second string’s bench for the game in Hyde on Tuesday night.

It is still early days in Manchester for the 20-year-old, who has risen from the third tier of Portuguese football to the top flight of the English game in a matter of weeks, but his unheralded playing career to date and the inauspicious start to his time at United combine to raise the spectre of other notorious cases of transfer misadventure. Bebé is clearly a long way off his full United debut but, until he turns out for the first team, speculation will continue to grow that he could be a rival for Ali Dia as the most infamous signing in Premier League history.

Dia had played football at a comparable level to Bebé in France and Germany before he got a friend to pose as George Weah in a telephone call to then-Southampton manager Graeme Souness. Passing himself off as Weah’s cousin and a Senegalese international when in fact he was no closer to an international call-up for the African nation than I am, Dia earned a one-month contract and lasted 53 minutes in a game against Leeds before Souness realised the full extent of his error of judgement.

Bebé was signed on the recommendation of Carlos Queiroz – who almost certainly was not speaking with a Liberian accent at the time – and the size of the fee probably had more to do with the fact that it was the release clause in his contract with Vitória de Guimarães and United wanted a quick sale, rather than £7m being an accurate valuation of the player. United supposedly beat Real Madrid to Bebé’s signature but, considering that José Mourinho signed Mesut Özil shortly afterwards, it is difficult not to sense that Madrid won the battle that mattered.

Nonetheless, judging from the YouTube clips of the player that were available at the time of the transfer, Bebé has the speed and physical stature that a modern forward needs. He might not turn out to be United’s answer to Didier Drogba, or their alternative to Emmanuel Adebayor, but with a plethora of Portuguese speakers already at the club Bebé still has every chance of settling in to life in England and contributing to United’s campaign.

Following the announcement of Fabio Capello’s first squad since it all went Emmanuel Frimpong in South Africa, ineptitude in the England ranks appears to have given way to unwillingness. On Sunday, hours after being called up for the friendly with Hungary this Wednesday, first Paul Robinson and then Wes Brown opted to retire from international football instead.

Robinson’s reason for withdrawing from the squad was simple enough; he didn’t fancy a spot on the bench. “As a professional who wants every chance to play football, I do not see myself as No3 or No4 goalkeeper. I find that role very frustrating,” he said. It is quite likely that Wes Brown felt a similar way too. Even though there are places to play for now given how poorly the team fared in South Africa, neither Robinson nor Brown felt like they would be the ones to profit. They would be right to think that too. Joe Hart’s time has come in goal, while Michael Dawson, Gary Cahill and Phil Jagielka are fresher options in central defence than Brown – who could have hoped to have been Glen Johnson’s understudy at right back at best.

The retirements, while embarrassing for Capello because of their timing and what they imply about the desire of the players to work with the Italian, are not bad news for England. Robinson will always be known as the goalkeeper who kicked air in Croatia in 2006. His last appearance for his country came against Russia the following year. Although he has regained his credibility at Blackburn, his chunky physique betrays a man who is perhaps more comfortable with life at club level than he ever was international football. Likewise, Wes Brown is a player capable of having an accomplished performance coaxed out of him in the Premier League but there has never been any danger of the Manchester United defender establishing himself in the England team.

Robinson has not played for England for three years; Brown took ten years to amass 23 caps. Had they announced their retirements on being snubbed for the World Cup, the news would barely have registered in the press. There is no reason for it to make any more of an impact now.

Uruguay beat South Korea 2-1 in Port Elizabeth on Saturday afternoon to become the first side through to the quarter-finals of the World Cup. Two strikes from Luis Suarez either side of a headed goal by Bolton’s Lee Chung-yong won the match for the South Americans in driving rain at the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium.

Suarez is now on three goals for the tournament, a tally matched by three other strikers: Gonzalo Higuain of Argentina, Spain’s David Villa, and Slovakia’s two-goal hero against Italy, Robert Vittek. However, for his performance against South Africa, which was rewarded with two goals, and an assist for Suarez’s first against South Korea, Uruguay’s Diego Forlan is currently the best-performing striker at the World Cup. Writing in Saturday’s Guardian, however, Mick McCarthy chose a front three of Landon Donovan (United States), Enrique Vera (Paraguay), and Gervinho (Ivory Coast) in his team of the tournament. While the other two have impressed to a degree, particularly Donovan, the presence of Gervinho seems perverse. McCarthy’s selection of the comically-coiffured Ivorian over the likes of Suarez and Forlan says everything you need to know about the strikers at Molineux (in terms of ability, not hair), even if the Wolves manager picked his dream team before Uruguay’s latest win.

There can be no denying, though, that teams from the UEFA region have been outperformed by their rivals from across the Atlantic so far in the tournament. All five of South America’s representatives at the World Cup survived the group stage. By and large, they have been better to watch than many of the European sides too.

Germany’s 4-0 rout of Australia remains the most impressive performance by a nation from football’s wealthiest region up to this point. The Netherlands took nine points from nine but did not thrill in the process, while Spain’s profligacy against Switzerland and Honduras raised doubts over their World Cup chances. England have been desperately disappointing so far, but at least they made it through. UEFA’s last two World Cup-winning nations, France and Italy, both finished at the foot of their groups, the latter losing out to unheralded Slovakia in a pulsating encounter that ended 3-2. Five other European nations – Greece, Slovenia, Serbia, Denmark, and Switzerland – are on their way home already too.

Argentina are the team of the tournament so far. With so many options in forward positions, Maradona even selected a winger, Jonas Gutierrez, at full back for his team’s first two games. Lionel Messi has yet to score but watching him try remains a tremendous spectacle, such as in the case of his rifled shot from distance against Greece that cracked back off the post. Uruguay, along with Chile and Paraguay, have also all played with flashes of panache as this African World Cup has evolved into a fiefdom for its South American contenders. Brazil might have played with the relative caution that was expected of Dunga’s side before the tournament but, in mitigation, they were faced with the spoiling tactics of North Korea and Portugal in two of their matches.

According to the Sunday Times, England’s players are urging Fabio Capello to include Joe Cole from the start in next Wednesday’s decisive group game against Slovenia. The players’ pleas echo those of England supporters. Cole has yet to feature in South Africa but fans of the national side are championing the Chelsea forward’s cause, seeing him as the man to loosen the static 4-4-2 approach that England have adopted so far at the World Cup.

Joe Cole’s place in the side would come at the expense of Emile Heskey’s role up front and would leave England with five in midfield. While that tactical switch might sound like a cautious step, in that Wayne Rooney would be left as the side’s lone striker, the tactical flexibility that a five-man midfield offers makes the formation far superior to the now-outmoded 4-4-2.

England’s five in midfield would be staggered into a group of two and a group of three. Some pundits would play two men in front of the defence and use three in support of Rooney, while others advocate a three-man screen ahead of the back four and two players behind the striker. According to the writers in the Sunday Times, joining Cole in midfield would be four from Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, Gareth Barry, Aaron Lennon, and Shaun Wright-Phillips. However, I would be inclined to recall James Milner and use him in tandem with Barry as England’s holding midfielders, with Gerrard, Lampard, and Cole ahead of the pair.

Regardless of how the midfield five are arranged, though, splitting them into two departments – one defensive, one attacking – reflects both evolution for the national side and, dare I say it, change in the national psyche too. England is not the same as the United Kingdom, I realise, but the recent election result has left the country with a coalition government and a feeling amongst the people that the three-party political system has run its course. Likewise, the division of football formations into strict defensive, midfield, and attacking units is also old-fashioned.

Against Slovenia, the roles of England’s midfield players should be defined by their proximity to the players immediately behind or ahead of them, in defence and attack, instilling a cooperative spirit in the side that complements, on paper at least, the political union currently in charge of the nation.

Jong Tae-se wept during the North Korean national anthem before his country’s opening game against Brazil on Tuesday night, but those watching this World Cup at home could be forgiven if they had already been bored to tears.

A total of 23 goals have been scored in the opening 14 games, a record low in the tournament’s history. Moreover, six of the matches so far have been drawn and two of those ended goalless. Only Germany have scored more than two goals in one match and, overall, there have been 13 goalless halves of football so far. Italia 90, the tournament often cited as the most disappointing of the modern era, since it forced FIFA to change the rules and ban the back pass, averaged 2.2 goals per game by its end but this South African instalment is currently sitting on 1.64.

It is tempting to suggest that the North Korea striker’s show of emotion was a pre-planned gesture made at the behest of that nation’s political regime, rather than a spontaneous waterworks display. Either way, Jong’s tears at Ellis Park paid homage to the significance of the occasion. The World Cup is so special to fans and players alike because it only happens every four years; only 18 have taken place before the current one and this is North Korea’s first appearance at a finals for 44 years.

Similarly, a profound sense of expectation, stemming from four long years of anticipation, has exacerbated the fans’ disappointment at the way in which the tournament has begun. Far from just wanting the football to thrill us, we assume it will.

Challenging this mindset, however, is the growing realisation that the thirty-two teams at the World Cup are loath to allow four years of preparation to be undone within the first 90 minutes. Despite the nations on show at the tournament not being the best group that the world has to offer, but rather a selection of the best from each region of the globe, there is not as much of a gap in quality between the teams as one might predict. Organisation and fitness count for so much in international football, where it is more difficult to replicate the skillful harmony of club football. As we have seen up to this point, then, when the stakes are so high and the players so well drilled, the quality of the football can suffer.

But before you start reading this article as if it was written by Mick McCarthy, a man so relentlessly downbeat on the BBC that his voice affects the brightness level of my television, remember that the World Cup is still less than a week old. By the end of Wednesday the group stage will still have just under two thirds left to run. As the players grow used to the ball some of the basic errors that have plagued the opening matches should be phased out, and as the teams get used to competing at altitude the pace of the games will certainly improve too.

If you’d said “Jabulani” to someone a few months ago they would have assumed you were repeating one of Del Boy’s catchphrases from Only Fools and Horses. Say it to them now and, if they know their football, they’ll probably start swearing. The Jabulani is the name of the ball that Adidas have manufactured for the World Cup and, if the criticism from the players is to be believed, it is about to ruin the tournament.

Jabulani might translate as “to celebrate” in Zulu but no goalkeeper has been throwing a party at the prospect of trying to catch the ball this summer. Tim Howard is the latest keeper to criticise Adidas’ creation, bemoaning the way it flies through the air, and Iker Casillas condemned it as a “beach ball” last week. David James doesn’t like the Jabulani either so he would do well to avoid visiting Loughborough University, where the ball was developed.

The Jabulani is the lightest ball ever at a World Cup. It’s also the roundest and, apparently, the more spherical a ball is the more unstable it is in the air. Although the designers have added grooves to the ball’s panels to give it a truer flight, some observers are predicting a flurry of long-distance goals this summer because of the speed with which the ball can be struck and its uncanny knack of swerving at will. The ball’s behaviour in the air is also said to be exaggerated at altitude, which will be a factor in South Africa.

Even if the ball does lead to a few improbable strikes though, and even if some keepers fall foul of trying to catch crosses, could we all stop moaning please? To listen to the gripes of players, coaches, and pundits is to be given the impression that, should David James strike the Jabulani fiercely enough from a goal kick, the ball will fly off into the African night and escape the gravitational pull of the Earth. It won’t; there might be more goals from distance, players might find it harder to control at first, and passes could be misplaced in the opening games, but that’s it. Come the knockout stages any early issues with the ball will have been forgotten.

The only thing more tiresome than the whinging about the ball is the constant barrage of criticism that is being directed the way of the vuvuzelas, the metre-long plastic trumpets that South African fans blow throughout matches. Xabi Alonso called for them to be banned after the Confederations Cup last year, saying that the incessant rasping of the trumpets drowned out the instructions of his colleagues on the pitch. Television viewers have also complained that the sound of the vuvuzelas makes it impossible to hear what the commentator is saying, while apparently there is a link between prolonged exposure to the noise and hearing damage amongst supporters.

Again, could we all stop moaning? Premier League commentators constantly point out that English grounds are quiet nowadays but the one thing that this World Cup won’t be short of is noise. True, it is an artificial noise rather than the more organic sound that Europeans are used to of fans singing and chanting, but the vuvuzela is as synonymous with South Africa’s fans as the rattle was with Britain’s in the first half of the twentieth century. It is better to have trouble hearing everything that Peter Drury says than to deny the hosts their instrument of choice.

In fact, could a vuvuzela be assigned to Gary Lineker in the event of Alan Shearer saying anything?

There was me thinking this was the calm before the storm. England arrived at their Rustenburg training base on Thursday morning with nine days of preparation and acclimatisation ahead of them before Saturday week’s opening group game against the United States. With only a low-key friendly against a local side to come, the national side’s focus should have been on training and – most importantly – staying fit.

The calm lasted for twenty-four hours. Rio Ferdinand is now almost certain to miss the World Cup after picking up a knee injury in England’s first training session. The team captain will seek a second opinion following the bleak verdict of the initial scan but Michael Dawson is set to fly out as his replacement within the next day.

Perhaps it had always been unrealistic to expect Rio to stay fit for the entire tournament. He made only 21 appearances for Manchester United last season as a succession of niggling injuries to his back and groin made it impossible for him to enjoy an extended run of games. As a consequence, the 31-year-old struggled to replicate his form of recent years on the occasions that he did appear for club or country.

But even though Rio was troubled early on against a vibrant Mexico side last week he improved as the first half went on before being substituted at the interval, and then he played solidly against Japan six days later. More importantly, after coming through those two warm-up games unscathed, it had been hoped that the centre-back was fitter than he had been all season and so was ready for a month’s unbroken football at the World Cup. A challenge by Emile Heskey has put paid to those hopes, however, and so Rio will be denied the opportunity to compete in his fourth World Cup.

England must now prepare for the tournament without their captain. Deciding who will skipper the side is a straightforward choice, with Steven Gerrard ready to take the armband. Rio’s place in defence will be harder to fill. Ledley King started against Mexico and is probably the most likely player to partner John Terry against the US. The Spurs defender has chronic injury issues of his own, of course, meaning that Jamie Carragher could yet complete his England comeback by lining up in Rustenburg. With Matthew Upson and the recalled Dawson also in the squad, the thinnest of silver linings to this setback comes from the fact that Capello at least has plenty of options to cope with Rio’s absence.

Gareth Barry has until Tuesday to prove his fitness to Fabio Capello and secure a place in the England squad for the World Cup. But his teammates have been doing their best to state Barry’s case for selection even while his ankle injury continues to put his participation in the group stage in doubt.

England might have won their final two warm-up games for South Africa, but Barry’s absence has been keenly felt in both. The midfield imbalance that plagued the national side during the years prior to Capello’s appointment has been granted an unwelcome return.

When David Beckham’s metatarsal became the world’s most famous broken bone in 2002, the Sun converted its front page into a prayer mat. It urged worried fans to call upon a higher power, to will the England captain back to fitness for the World Cup. A crass ploy, of course, but an understandable one within the context of tabloid journalism. There is little likelihood of the Sun reviving their tactic of 2002 this summer in a bid to help Barry’s ankle get better, but the Manchester City midfielder is arguably as important to England’s chances in South Africa as Beckham was in the Far East eight years ago.

Those who have played instead of Barry recently have not done well. Michael Carrick and James Milner failed to impress against Mexico in the middle of the pitch. Tom Huddlestone started alongside Frank Lampard against Japan but Huddlestone was off the pitch by the time England scraped victory. Another possible Barry understudy, West Ham’s Scott Parker, did not play at all in either game.

As is commonly acknowledged, the blossoming of Barry as an international midfielder under Capello has benefited Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard too. With Barry the withdrawn midfielder, Gerrard and Lampard are free to get forward. The Liverpool captain starts on the left wing when Barry and Lampard occupy the central berths in a midfield four, but again this benefits the balance of the side. Gerrard’s natural instinct is to move infield from the left, permitting Ashley Cole to overlap from full back.

Barry’s defensive awareness was missed against Mexico, with Carrick and Milner at fault, and the away side overwhelmed England’s back four in the first half. But prior to Sunday’s match there was already a groundswell of opinion in favour of England altering their midfield system in anticipation of Barry’s unavailability. Both David Moyes and Terry Butcher advocated change in the weekend’s papers, with the former plumping for 4-3-3 in the Sunday Times and the latter suggesting 4-1-4-1 in his column in the Mirror.

The eagerness for an extra man in midfield, accommodated by doing without a strike partner for Rooney, has come about because of Barry’s absence. Without him, England suddenly look insecure in midfield. They will need to solve that problem in the knockout stages, if Barry is unavailable, and if England can get out of the group without him.

Beating the best side in North America two months after a victory against the best side in Africa should be a cause of optimism for England in their quest to become the best side in the world, but Monday night’s 3-1 win over Mexico at Wembley was as qualified a success as the defeat of Egypt in March by the same score.

Mexico, who beat the United States 5-0 in the final of the CONCACAF Gold Cup last year, got the better of England in the first half, just as Egypt did when they came to Wembley fresh from having won their third successive Africa Cup of Nations title. This time, however, England managed to reach the interval in front whereas against the Pharaohs they trailed to a Mohamed Zidan goal after the first half.

The fact that Capello’s men held a 2-1 advantage over Mexico at the break owed as much to good fortune as it did to design. Ledley King had the freedom of the Mexican penalty area to nod home Peter Crouch’s header following a corner for the first goal after 17 minutes. Crouch is a difficult player to defend at set pieces for any side, even one with as relaxed an approach to marking as Javier Aguirre’s team. The Tottenham striker was at it again after 35 minutes for England’s second goal, and his 21^st in 38 international appearances, when he managed to finish off an aerial ball in the aftermath of a corner by hook or by crook. Mostly by crook, replays suggested, given the position of his arm.

Guillermo Franco prodded a rebound past Robert Green with the last kick of the first half. The West Ham player’s celebrations were muted but that did not explain the bizarre outburst of incredulity by ITV commentator Peter Drury at the goal being given. It was a good three yards over the line, Peter, even Roy Carroll could see that.

Two minutes after the break, Glen Johnson cut in from the right wing and struck a powerful left-foot shot past the diminutive Oscar Perez in the Mexico goal. It was the Liverpool defender’s first international goal and it ended the game as a contest, which was a shame because in the first half Mexico had posed a real challenge to England by deciding, quite reasonably as it happened, that running at King and Rio Ferdinand was the best way to go. Between England’s goals, for example, little Carlos Vela and Giovani dos Santos had turned on their afterburners and left the long limbs of Ledley and Rio creaking in their wake, only for Green to produce a fine stop to deny Vela.

The big loser after Monday’s game, on a night when none of the fringe players particularly seized their opportunity, was Michael Carrick. His great asset used to be his ability to retain possession, never a bad thing at international level, and his performance as a substitute against Egypt earned him much praise. That was before his form for Manchester United collapsed at the end of the season, though, and tonight he gave away the ball with all the carefree abandon of a drama student distributing flyers on the Royal Mile during the Edinburgh Festival. I would be surprised if he goes to South Africa now.

The margin of the result flattered England, then, but what Portugal would give for a win – they were held to a goalless draw by Cape Verde on the same evening.

Inter Milan continue to dominate Italian football and have finally taken that form into European competition. However, while fans in this country are constantly fretting about the difficulty that English players face in securing a place in Premier League clubs’ first elevens, it is worth pointing out that Inter’s starting line-up for Saturday night’s Champions League final against Bayern Munich will, almost certainly, be bereft of Italian players.

Despite winning their fifth consecutive Italian league title last Sunday, not one Inter player features in national coach Marcello Lippi’s provisional World Cup squad. In truth, José Mourinho’s side this season did not feature any realistic candidates for inclusion by Lippi. Young full back Davide Santon has had his progress stifled by injury this season, while Mario Balotelli’s firebrand personality continues to blight his club career.

The absence of players from Italy’s top side in the Azzurri squad is not the only World Cup-related quirk about Inter Milan. Four members of Inter’s typical starting line-up are from Argentina, but only two have made coach Diego Maradona’s squad. Diego Milito and Walter Samuel have made Maradona’s final 23-man squad but Javier Zanetti and Esteban Cambiasso have not. At first glance, the exclusion of both Zanetti and Cambiasso appears baffling.

While Maradona’s selection policy throughout his tenure as Argentina coach has often defied rational explanation, though, he has at least been consistent in the case of Zanetti and Cambiasso. The former was replaced as captain when Maradona took the reins, with Javier Macherano assuming the role, and so Zanetti’s standing in the squad was undermined as a result. Cambiasso, meanwhile, was regarded as an underperforming figure for Argentina prior to Maradona’s appointment. The new coach dropped Cambiasso from the national squad on taking over and so the midfielder’s omission from the World Cup twenty-three is really no surprise. Zanetti is also alleged to have criticised one of Maradona’s pre-match team talks in front of the rest of the players, which probably sealed his fate.

It is reasonable to suggest that Maradona does favour players whose personalities he likes, such as the warhorse Martin Palermo and the ever-running Jonas Gutiérrez. He even has a supposedly cool relationship with Lionel Messi. Should Inter overcome Bayern on Saturday night, though, it will seem perverse if two central figures for the European club champions are to be both watching the World Cup on television.

Fabio Capello will name his provisional 30-man World Cup squad on Tuesday and the big news over the weekend has been that Jamie Carragher looks to be ready to end his international exile and return to the fold. If the Liverpool defender is named in the party for the friendlies against Mexico and Japan later this month, England’s final warm-up games prior to the tournament in South Africa, then his place in the squad raises a couple of important issues.

Firstly, if it is rare for an England player to decide of his own volition that he would rather not be selected for international duty, then it is almost unheard of for such a player to return to the side later on. Alan Shearer and Paul Scholes both stepped down, after Euro 2000 and Euro 2004 respectively, when they still had something to offer, and even though Scholes has occasionally been linked with a return to the squad such stories have always been met with a polite but clear denial. David Beckham relinquished the captaincy after the last World Cup but he never asked to be removed from future squads, with Steve McClaren choosing to leave him out in the cold for almost a year instead. Carragher, however, called time on his own international career in July 2007 because he was frustrated at finding Rio Ferdinand and John Terry immovable ahead of him in the centre-back pecking order.

Secondly, if Capello has convinced Carragher to come back on board, then it proves just how thinly England’s defensive resources are being stretched just one month before the World Cup. The 32-year-old remains one of the Premier League’s better defenders but he is not at the same level as he was at the time of his international retirement. Pace has never been one of his assets and this season such a deficiency has been glaringly obvious. The Liverpool defender’s leadership remains important to Liverpool – whose wretched league campaign might have been worse had their defence not remained relatively solid, conceding a respectable 35 goals going into the last game of the season – but, if there were not so many doubts over the form and fitness of other England defenders, would Carragher be anywhere near the national squad?

The likely call-up of the brilliant but injury-blighted Ledley King on Tuesday also signals that, for one reason or another, Capello is a little concerned about England’s options at centre half. Captain Rio Ferdinand, £24m-man Joleon Lescott, and Wes Brown are all battling injury, Jonathan Woodgate was ruled out for the season weeks ago, and Matthew Upson is struggling for form. Former skipper John Terry is fully fit but, while his place in the starting line-up is not under threat and his place in the squad is beyond doubt, his ability to hold the defence together can no longer be counted upon because a difficult few months in his personal life have coincided with a dip in his form and his discipline, most evidently against Spurs last month. The uncapped Michael Dawson and fit-again Phil Jagielka have an outside chance of making the squad, then, if Carragher and King do not get the nod.

For the record, this would be my provisional 30-man squad:

Goalkeepers: Green, Hart, James

Defenders: Baines, Brown, Carragher, A Cole, Ferdinand, King, Jagielka, G Johnson, Terry, Upson

Midfielders: Carrick, J Cole, Downing, Gerrard, Hargreaves, Huddlestone, A Johnson, Lampard, Lennon, Milner, Walcott

Strikers: Agbonlahor, Defoe, Crouch, Heskey, Rooney, Zamora

The Premier League title race was given the kiss of life on Saturday, albeit a lingering kiss that began in the early afternoon and carried on until the evening as the action in Manchester and north London unfolded. First, Paul Scholes rose unchallenged in the Manchester City penalty area to hand a last-minute derby victory to their neighbours United in the day’s lunchtime kick-off. In the evening game, Spurs followed up their own derby success over Arsenal with another 2-1 home victory, this time against league-leaders Chelsea. With both sides having three games left to play, Chelsea now lead United by just one point at the top of the table. Chelsea’s defeat could also have allowed Arsenal to rejoin the title race, but the Gunners conceded three goals in the final ten minutes of their match at Wigan on Sunday, losing 3-2 in the process, and so they remain six points off the lead and seemingly out of the hunt.

Before Saturday’s particular turn of events, the title race seemed to be beyond resuscitation. After squandering what chances they carved out against Blackburn Rovers last Sunday during a goalless draw at Ewood Park, Manchester United watched Chelsea defeat Bolton by a stoic one-goal margin at Stamford Bridge last Tuesday to go four points clear. Saturday’s Manchester derby seemed to be ending in United’s second stalemate in as many weekends, with Roberto Mancini’s substitutions of Adam Johnson for Patrick Vieira and Emmanuel Adebayor for Shaun Wright-Phillips indicating that the City manager was quite content with a point. But with seconds left in injury time, Patrice Evra delivered his final cross of the afternoon into the City penalty area and Scholes, having been pushed further forward for the final part of the game, headed past Shay Given.

Spurs’ sumptuous performance against Chelsea at White Hart Lane merited victory by a greater margin than the same 2-1 scoreline with which they saw off Arsenal last Wednesday night. Jermain Defoe converted a fifteenth-minute penalty after John Terry was adjudged by referee Phil Dowd to have handled in the penalty area. Chelsea had already survived two penalty shouts during Spurs’ early onslaught, as the tone of the game was set from the start. Gareth Bale doubled Spurs’ lead on forty-three minutes when he cut inside Paulo Ferreira and drove a wonderful strike past Petr Cech with his right foot.

Chelsea made two tactical substitutions at half-time - adding to the one enforced change they made in the first half when Michael Ballack replaced the injured John Obi Mikel - and they suffered a scare before the second half had even begun when Didier Drogba complained of a muscle strain. The Ivorian remained on the pitch to ensure that Chelsea restarted the game with eleven players, but they were down to ten men midway through the half when John Terry was sent off after two reckless challenges in the space of four minutes brought the embattled England defender two yellow cards. Jermain Defoe had already missed a glorious opportunity to extend Spurs’ lead to three, and the home side wasted further chances before Frank Lampard managed to pull a goal back in stoppage time.

While Gareth Bale’s heroics on Spurs’ left flank and the way in which Roman Pavlyuchenko plagued the centre of Chelsea’s defence mean that plaudits should be heaped on both players, Scholes’ performance on Saturday still managed to exceed that of the Welshman and the Russian. United’s captain, Gary Neville, said after the dramatic climax against City that Scholes had “passed them to death” and Sir Alex Ferguson added that the midfielder was, simply, “wonderful.” Scholes sits deeper than ever before in United’s midfield and yesterday it was the turn of Darren Fletcher and Darron Gibson to do the running around him. While they buzzed forward, it was left to the man that Zinedine Zidane described as “the greatest player of his generation” to break up City’s attacks and to act as United’s fulcrum when they regained possession, moving the ball forward or spreading it wide with unerring efficiency.