THIRTEEN-TO-ONE is about the best price you'll get this morning on Manchester United winning the Treble, odds which English football might not see again for some years. If the clean sweep of Premiership, FA Cup and European Cup is already the Impossible Dream, then next season it could become the implausible one. Expanded European competition will drain the stamina, and erode still further the motivation for lesser domestic trinkets. Talk of trebles may be restricted to closing time at the supporters' bar.
In the here-and-now of mid-March 1999, United's task can almost look straightforward. They are 270 minutes from the European Cup final, perhaps 90 from Wembley and they stand at the top of the domestic ladder with nine Premiership matches to come. Last week's victory over Chelsea, spread over two FA Cup ties, appears to have done as much good as harm to their momentum in knockout football, if only by issuing a sharp, blunt message to Internazionale, whom they visit on Wednesday.
"I think we'll score over there," Alex Ferguson, the United manager, keeps repeating, ahead of United's date in Milan. By now, those words have gone round and round the printing presses of all the Gazettas and Corrieres, as intended. In the psychological endgame, at which United prepare as hard as any team, their effectiveness on the counter-attack is important. Inter, moreover, will also have cottoned on to Dwight Yorke's habit of accumulating his cup goals in pairs.
Two-nil up from the first leg, United should board their flight from Manchester airport on Tuesday in good heart and health. With the exception of the absent Nicky Butt and remaining doubts over Ronny Johnsen's recovery from the hamstring strain he picked up against Inter 11 days ago, they went into the weekend without serious concerns over injury.
On the night, Ferguson will ask his players for bravery, maturity and a cool response to an atmosphere as heated as the tifosi can muster. One English veteran of the San Siro cautions United against a fierce first 10 minutes. "The opening phase will be important," said Roy Hodgson, who managed Inter for almost two seasons. "There'll be a big, vociferous crowd of the sort you don't see in many other countries. That won't necessarily bother the United players, who are pretty experienced in Europe now, but what it can do is give the home team a boost early on. Inter will have to come out flying."
Hodgson will be among Wednesday's 75,000-plus crowd, in his role as Uefa's technical observer, nice enough work to fill his time between jobs. The former Blackburn boss acknowledges, however, that he will be returning to the San Siro with mixed emotions. He talks of his enduring attachment to the biggest club of a cosmopolitan managerial career; he also talks as a patriot and friend of Ferguson. While the Inter squad Hodgson took charge of and helped assemble has undergone a dramatic overhaul, the aura of the place has not.
"I still speak occasionally to Massimo Moratti, the club president," said Hodgson. "I imagine he's a bit bemused by the situation at the moment. Inter have just been knocked out of the Italian Cup and their league position means they're unlikely to qualify for next year's Champions League, so domestically the best they can hope for is to creep into a Uefa Cup place.
"When I was there and we lost two games in a row it was considered a disaster. This Inter side have just had a run where they've lost five out of six, some of them to teams they would consider humble opposition, like Bari and Perugia. That will have seemed like a catastrophe for them. United will be up against a severely wounded animal."
One, he advises, which can still bite back on its own territory. Inter, note, have won all of their home matches in the Champions League this season, and beat the holders, Real Madrid, by a two-goal margin back in November. Nor is Ferguson insensitive to the long tradition of English teams tripping up during the Italian legs of their European adventures. In the course of the 1990s, 13 competitive expeditions have been made to Italy by England or her clubs - 10 have ended in defeat on the day, three in draws.
Inter's part in that history goes all the way back to Liverpool's contentious European Cup reverse of 1964-65, when the Merseysiders took a 3-1 lead to Milan and then lost 3-0 there, via two disputed Inter goals. Aston Villa's memories are fresher: 2-0 up from the home leg of their Uefa Cup tie in the 1990-91 season, they lost 3-0 at San Siro. If United are a more streetwise outfit than either of those sides, they would still do well to leaf through the club's own Italian archive. The city of Milan figures large in United's early European odyssey. It was there that they went out to Milan in their first continental tie after the 1958 Munich air crash; it was also there that they gave up their title as European champions, 30 seasons ago, beaten in the 1968-69 semi-final.
Hodgson's money would still be on United to knock an Italian club out of Europe for the first time in their history, and he believes they may even win the second leg.
"I wouldn't be too surprised," said Hodgson. "They look confident and they've got a lot of goalscorers in the team, five or six who you know are capable of chipping in a goal if the opportunity comes up. Roy Keane looks to be back in top form and Peter Schmeichel looks very strong. If they can defend as well as they did against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge last Wednesday, then the pressure may turn to United's advantage. And the Inter fans won't be as patient as Chelsea's were. The only attitude Inter can take into this game is 's**t or bust'."
