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Manchester United's march to a record 19th league title was greeted with joy in the red half of Manchester and with something close to relief on the back pages, where the sub-editors had been sitting on a mountain of puns for weeks.
A 2–1 win over Chelsea at Old Trafford on 8 May all but settled the race, and the red-tops, led by The Sun, wheeled out the old favourites. The rest of the week found room for Wayne Rooney, Noel Gallagher, Peter Crouch, a Liverpool transfer rhyme and Fifa. Here it is.
United and the title
Taken as red
With Arsenal and Chelsea both suffering very public collapses at different points in the season, the title was United's to lose. Ferguson's side were never as dominant as some of his great teams but they strode through the second half of the campaign, and with no nail-biting finish on offer The Sun declared the title "taken as red". It was a pun nobody could argue with. United made it official at Ewood Park on 14 May, drawing 1–1 with Blackburn thanks to a Rooney penalty, and moved one ahead of Liverpool's 18.
Rooney's gesture
Rooney was in the papers again, as he was most weeks. In the Chelsea game he appeared to make a two-fingered gesture towards the visiting fans; he insisted he had been pointing at his eyes about a refereeing decision, and the FA cleared him. The Sun showed little interest in the disciplinary details and plenty in a classic pun, which it placed with the subtlety of a tabloid that knew exactly what it was doing.
Ferguson's achievement
The scale of what Ferguson had done was hard to overstate. He had broken the Old Firm's grip on Scotland with Aberdeen and beaten Real Madrid in the 1983 Cup Winners' Cup final, yet his work at Old Trafford dwarfed even that. Tributes poured in from players, managers and pundits. The Sun chose to mark the moment with a mocked-up picture that is best left undescribed.
Celebrities and the Manchester rivalry
Gallagher versus Neville
Not everyone in Manchester was celebrating. Noel Gallagher, City's most famous supporter, took exception to Gary Neville tweeting lyrics from the Oasis song "Fade Away" to mark the title, and said so in no uncertain terms. The Sun printed his reply with relish and added the story of the guitar Neville once sent to Gallagher to sign, which came back with a short birthday message, an insult and the letters MCFC. It is hard not to warm to Gallagher a little after that.
Peter O'Toole at Eastlands
Spurs have had great players down the years: Danny Blanchflower, Jimmy Greaves, Glenn Hoddle, Paul Gascoigne, Jürgen Klinsmann. According to The Sun, the eight-time Academy Award nominee Peter O'Toole lined up against City on the Wednesday night. In fact the headline was a clumsy fit for a clumsy moment: Peter Crouch's own goal gave City a 1–0 win, secured fourth place for Roberto Mancini's side and ended Tottenham's faint hopes of returning to the Champions League. Spurs' first adventure in that competition, months earlier, is covered in a piece on their Champions League progress, and the wider club story in the Tottenham Hotspur section.
Transfers and Fifa
Super duper Young
Rhymes are prized above almost everything by tabloid sub-editors, even when the names involved have to be twisted out of shape. The Sun managed two in a compact headline about Liverpool's interest in Aston Villa's Ashley Young. As it turned out, Young went to Old Trafford instead, joining United that June.
Fifa is not corrupt
The best line of the week came from an unexpected source. When Mohamed bin Hammam, then challenging Sepp Blatter for the Fifa presidency, insisted that the governing body was not corrupt, even the straight-laced BBC could not resist a deadpan headline. Within weeks bin Hammam had withdrawn from the election amid bribery allegations and been suspended, and he was later banned from football for life. The cast of characters around Fifa at the time is sketched in Jack Warner makes Clay Davis look like a saint.
A fortnight later United's season ended at Wembley with a 3–1 defeat by Barcelona in the Champions League final, and Giggs's name dominated a very different set of front pages, as the Ryan Giggs special recalls.