GOD looks after drunks, little children . . . and Juventus. Manchester United's all-too-familiar opponents in the semi-finals of the European Cup next month have once again sneaked through the preliminaries by the skin of their teeth and survived the quarter-finals, thanks to an extraordinary goalkeeping blunder in Piraeus.
Strange how helpful that seaside stadium, home of the Greek champions Olympiakos, has been to Juve. Last season, at the end of the preliminary phase, Juventus seemed down and out, only for a last-gasp goal by Olympiakos and the madman's flytrap of the eliminating tournament to come to their rescue.
Rosenborg Trondheim, of Norway, were winning by a goal in Greece and they gave away a late free kick. Up came the Yugoslav midfielder Predrag Djordjevic, who was also on parade last Wednesday, to score with a devastating long shot.
After 85 minutes of the game in Piraeus last week, Juve were a goal down and thus out of the competition, when Alessandro Birindelli, their substitute right-back, put over a straightforward, high cross from the right. Somehow or other, Dimitrius Eleftheropoulos, the Greek goalkeeper, who had looked confident until then, got underneath the ball, lost it and allowed it to be poked forward for Antonio Conte, the Juventus captain, who stabbed it in from close range.
So Juve ride on. They are not the Juventus who, inspired by the arrival of Holland's Edgar Davids, reached the final last season, still less the Juventus that won the Cup in 1996, when Gianluca Vialli and Fabrizio Ravanelli played their ultimate game for the club in Rome.
It has been a torrid and tormented season for the Signora d'Italia, Italy's favourite club - though not Turin's. It was known from the first that this would be Marcello Lippi's last season as manager; indeed, one hears whispers that the deal between him and Inter was done fully two years ago. Lippi's mid-season departure - he was apparently no longer able to motivate a team that had been floundering for weeks - could not have been foreseen. Matters had not been helped by injury to Alessandro Del Piero, the club's most gifted attacker.
Lippi's place has been taken by Carlo Ancelotti. This did not please the fans as Ancelotti, sacked by Parma last season, made his name as a player with two of Juve's traditional rivals, Roma and Milan.
Anti-Ancelotti slogans appeared on Turin walls, but he has gradually won over the fans, thanks to a sustained unbeaten run. Ancelotti has relaxed the exigent training programme and made some productive changes to the team, notably that of switching the versatile Angelo Di Livio, fundamentally an outside-right and seemingly due for transfer this summer, to left-back in a 4-3-1-2 formation.
Di Livio has done well, but Zinedine Zidane, so often the motor and inspiration of the team, has been out of sorts. In Piraeus, he was largely ineffective because of a knee injury and, to conquer United, Juventus will need him to be fully fit.
What they are unlikely to find is an adequate partner up front for Filippo Inzaghi, who came back recently after injury in his old, ebullient form, volleying a spectacular goal in the first leg against Olympiakos in Turin.
But Juan Esnaider, the Argentinian urgently enlisted from Espanol of Barcelona, has been a blunt instrument and had a poor game in Greece, giving way 20 minutes from the end to Nicola Amoruso.
Daniel Fonseca, the left-footed Uruguayan, who has been more effective, surprisingly stayed on the bench, but could return against United. Lippi signed him from Roma when Fonseca's career seemed stalled and, after an uneasy beginning, he has recently looked sharp.
Alex Ferguson will no doubt have noted that Juve looked vulnerable in Piraeus on the right flank of their defence, where Grigorios Georgatos's runs and crosses caused tremendous trouble, leading to Sinica Gogic's early headed goal, and the later header by Georgis Mamantidis which Juve's reserve goalkeeper, Michelangelo Rampulla, heroically turned over the bar.
That would have made it 2-0, and goodbye Juventus. Scope here, surely, for Ryan Giggs to do great damage; as an attacker, one hopes, rather than as the occasional, reluctant left-back we saw at the San Siro.
Last season, United won a thrilling game against Juve at Old Trafford by the odd goal in five, only to go down to an Inzaghi goal in Turin. Previously, Juventus had beaten United there to eliminate them on a night when Ferguson strangely sacrificed Eric Cantona as an uncomfortable lone striker. This time, United must be favoured to break the sequence, although they cannot afford the numerous defensive slips they made last Wednesday at the San Siro.
Bayern Munich and Dynamo Kiev, who contest the other semi-final, would be hard opponents. Although Bayern strolled through 4-0 last week in Kaiserslautern, they are bound to feel the loss through injury of Giovane Elber, their electric Brazilian striker. United knew all about him when they played Bayern in Munich in last autumn's eliminators.
Carsten Jancker and the lively Alexander Zickler make a dangerous pair, but hardly as deadly as Kiev's Andrei Shevchenko and Sergei Rebrov, who tormented Real Madrid's defence in Dynamo's 2-0 win in Kiev.
Real, however, controlled much of the game and had Predrag Mijatovic, their Yugoslav striker, been available, they might have done better.
Can Rebrov and Shevchenko infiltrate the Bayern defence, in which 38-year-old Lothar Matthäus is the sweeper, as easily as they did Real's?
