Don't panic: Sir Alex Ferguson goes all Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on us

IN many of the less relaxed football clubs on the Inner Rim of the Footballing Galaxy, Sir Alex Ferguson has already supplanted the great Sir Alf Ramsey as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for he scores over the older, more pedestrian (and now dead) manager in two important respects.
First, Sir Alex is Scottish; and secondly he now has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on his forehead.
After earth-shaking Festive season defeats against rock-bottom Blackburn Rovers (3-2) and Newcastle United (3-0), the Manchester United boss goes in to today’s FA Cup third round clash against neighbours City with the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy mantra firmly in mind.
Sir Alex, who turned 70 on December 31, said: “We have the experience to cope, we need to get the show on the road.
”It’s not a time for panic. Losing a game at this time of the year can sometimes happen.”
The Scot, not averse to the odd Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster (the effect is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick, according to the Guide), is only too aware of Roberto Mancini’s last outing: a universally acclaimed 3-0 win over Liverpool on Tuesday.
He said: ”Advantage to them, of course.”
Sir Alex, who could do with a towel (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels. A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value — you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble‐sanded beaches of Santraginus Ⅴ, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand‐to‐hand‐combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal - a mindbogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you, daft as a bush like Joey Barton, but ravenous; you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough, but that's enough about towels) and a few goals from returning Boxing Day Gargle Blaster Wayne Rooney at The Etihad Stadium on Sunday (live on SuperSports 3, 5pm South African time) adds a few words for arch-rivals Liverpool, who rank alongside Vogon Constructor Fleets in Mancunian affections.
Under pressure to ease tensions over the racist abused heaped on United full back Patrice Evra by Uruguayan Luis Suarez, Sir Alex growled: “It is nice of Liverpool to call for peace talks through the press. You would have thought they would come to Manchester United first.
”I do not see why there is any need for it. I have nothing to say about it.”
Suarez has been banned for eight games after using the N-word nine times and telling Evra “I’m Spanish I don’t speak to blacks”.
Ironically, his return from suspension is likely to fall at Old Trafford on February 11 where the Uruguayan will be about as welcome as an appearance from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.
As for reports of Chelsea's unhappy Frank Lampard moving to Old Trafford, you might have well as suggested Zaphod Beeblebrox was planning a move to Manchester. Sir Alex grunted: "Do you really believe that? There is no foundation to it. We won't get the players that we would like. What can you get in January? What do you do? Do you take a second-rate player? No, of course you don't."
So if not Lamps, then what exactly IS the answer for gloomy United as the transfer window opens? That's easy. 42.
For this and more stories like it, read South Africa's new Sunday tabloid SCOOP! this Sunday, available from all good newsagents, supermarkets and street vendors. See www.scoopnews.co.za.

Here they are: The top ten goals of the year and guess who's Number One?

The Premier League's top ten goals of the season so far, as chosen by Alan Curbishley and Andy Townsend on the New Year's Day show:

10: Sergio Aguero for Manchester City, his second on debut as sub against Swansea.



9: City team-mate David Silva against QPR, touch forward and hit with left foot.



8: Bryan Ruiz for Fulham against Everton, lobs Tim Howard.



7: Gareth Bale's surging run and finish against Norwich the day after Boxing Day.



6: Spurs again, Luca Modric’s beautiful bending right footer against Liverpool.



5: Swansea's long build-up to score against Blackburn, 18 passes before Leroy Lita’s header.



4: Carlos Tevez's brilliant free-kick against Stoke. Remember him



3: Robin van Persie's cracking volley against Everton, one of 35 scored in 2011.



2: Tiote's unbelievable volley to complete Newcastle's 4-0 comeback against Gunners



1: Wayne Rooney (remember him?) with his overhead strike against neighbours City

Peter Roebuck: Is this the final, damning truth? Can it be any clearer?

Sadly, the one of my New Year's resolutions is falling down around my years as I write. I promised last night to leave the Peter Roebuck situation alone, not to harp on about the sad suicide of a fine cricket writer with a dark side.
But my twitter mate Arthur Matebula (www.twitter.com/@bossarthur) changed all that when he sent me a link to Adam Shand's piece on Roebuck, printed in the New Year's Day edition of the Melbourne Age in Australia.
On the day of his death, and given the circumstances surrounding his plunge from a sixth floor hotel window, I watched all the glowing eulogies drop. What a great man Roebuck was, they said, waxing lyrical about how he was never scared to tell the truth. Bollocks. So I wrote http://neal-collins.blogspot.com/2011/11/peter-roebuck-eulogy-nobody-will-have.html, tagged "The Eulogy Nobody Will Have the Courage to Publish".
I also took the time to warn the Johannesburg Star's chief sports writer Kevin McCallum not to eulogise too glowingly about a man convicted of abusing three South African teenagers. He chose to ignore my advice and told readers of his once-respectable tome to wear black armbands at The Wanderers for Roebuck when the second Test between South Africa took place a few days later.
The response to my blog and subsequent warnings was immediate and overwhelming.
McCallum blocked me on Twitter, the rest of the cricket writers, Australian and South African, accused me of homophobia and bitterness. Go to the blog now. Read the 200 comments that came in. Many of them were disgusting but delivered from behind the coward's shield of anonymity.
Most were from cricket lovers, some were from transparently sent by cricket writers I have frequently shared a press box - and a drink - with.
The truth is contained, emphatically, in Shand's lengthy, carefully researched piece http://www.theage.com.au/sport/cricket/the-roebuck-tragedy-a-tale-of-love-beatings-and-blackmail-20111231-1pgmk.html
You hope for apologies in these situations. When you get it right and everybody else gets it so badly wrong. You hope people will appreciate the courage it took to write that blog that day. And you hope that they will finally recognise the logic behind it.
How can we eulogise about a cricket writer who preyed on young men, using his status as an international globe-trotter to attract young men? I'd always suspected it, but the manner of his death was final confirmation. And I couldn't have been the only person who realised that.
A man who set up charities and a home near Pietermaritzburg to further his warped, perverted habits, so clearly revealed by Shand's piece had to be exposed.
But no. Apologies are scarce. Instead, the great and the good of cricket held a major commemoration of Roebuck's death at Sydney last month before the Test match against New Zealand.
His estranged family in England have used the alarming silence on Roebuck's true nature to launch an anti-South African tirade, suggesting the police were in some way responsible for his death. I must question their motives.
And just today, Luke Alfred writes a piece in the South African Sunday Times, completely missing the point and lauding Roebuck for his attack on Zimbabwe and their president Robert Mugabe.
Of course, those attacks were motivated by Roebuck's need to impress his young, penniless Zimbabwean students at Straw Hat farm in Pietermaritzburg, an attempt to further his perverted empire.
Roebuck got away with masquerading as a kindly old buffer for years, as the Age proves today. His mates in the cricket-writing clique chose to ignore his procilivities, choosing to see them as mere eccentricities.
A former public school boy with a penchant for handing out hidings? No. More than that. The bloke was a predator, a manipulator of helpless youngsters who depended on him.
That's the truth. I'm glad I wrote it. Ashamed of those who chose to ignore the evidence, preferring to eulogise about his undeniable cricket writing skills.
So to Howard Donaldson, Malcolm Conn, Kevin McCallum and the rest, read http://neal-collins.blogspot.com/2011/11/peter-roebuck-eulogy-nobody-will-have.html and http://www.theage.com.au/sport/cricket/the-roebuck-tragedy-a-tale-of-love-beatings-and-blackmail-20111231-1pgmk.html.
Then tell me if I was right. And apologise. You can find a link to do just that immediately below this blog. And don't hide behind the anonymous tag to have another blast. Nobody should stoop so low.