Sweet dreams are made of these

For all the fuss I make about my rejection of destiny, luck and all that jazz, my iconoclasm succeeds in eluding me in times of need. Pascal’s gambit, I suppose.

It was another of those Saturday afternoons. The ceremonial ablution had been completed, the watery dal swallowed and the Gmail account checked and re-checked. ‘Write editorial; Photocopy power systems notes; Prepare for instrumentation TS’ read the to-do list I’d super-glued to my wall earlier that day. They could all wait. Two more hours would have to be killed before the long overdue visit of the Two Moneymen. IPL it would be for now, I decided. Much to the delight of a good many of my darker brethren, the Deccan Chargers seemed poised for a mammoth score. Five minutes into my arrival, three wickets had fallen and 200 now seemed a distant dream. There. The minority Mumbai Indians crowd now looked at me with an added sense of respect. With Tendulkar dropping a sitter minutes ago, a new messiah was needed. And he was found in the long-forgotten corners of Azad Bhawan.

My rating further soared an hour later. Tendulkar got Mumbai off to a decent start, with Duminy and Dhawan still to come. However, a five minute spell saw the three men throw away their wickets cheaply and put Mumbai seemed all but beaten. As luck would have it, it was precisely during those five blighted minutes that I chose to make the long trip to Nesci for a cup of coffee- my fifth of the day. “How could you do this to us?” exclaimed one distraught supporter. A few Harbhajan swings and misses sealed Mumbai’s fate. It was a lost cause now- even my presence could do little to alter the course of the match. The minority Mumbai crowd was left heartbroken, though my promises of staying rooted to my seat for every Indians’ game for the rest of the tournament lifted their spirits a fair bit.

The rain-gods were my next target. I prayed for the Chennai-Kolkata match to be washed out, to save me the trouble of reasoning with Cautley's bonehead of a canteen-wallah. They duly obliged. It was my day all right.

Nothing, though, could have braced me for the next forty five minutes. I gave the first half of the United-Spurs game a miss, choosing to attend The Two Moneymen’s generous treat at CCD instead. 2-0 down, read the scoreline on my return to Azad. “I hate saying this but my hope is thinning with each passing game,” I texted the Maddu Minion. Again, my arrival turned things around in a manner that I hadn’t imagined possible even in the wildest of my wild dreams.

A superhuman performance from Wayne Rooney ensured that Heurelho Gomes’ goal was breached five times in the next forty-five minutes. 5-2, the final score.

Liverpool, Juventus, Bayern Munich 1999, Tottenham 2001, Everton 2007, Aston Villa 2009, Tottenham 2009. The catalogue of great United comebacks has entered another chapter. Football, bloody hell!

P.S: Another football post. Apologies, Al.