PETER RAMAGE’S NIGHTMARE STILL had 33 minutes to run when the Newcastle United right back, with an age to pick his pass, kicked the ball aimlessly out of play. It was hard to decipher exactly what Jean-Alain Boumsong said to Ramage as he walked over to offer his troubled team-mate a consolatory pat on the back, but “join the club” or “been there, done it, got the T-shirt” might have been about the gist of it.

Graeme Souness was the studio guest of Sky Sports for yesterday’s mismatch with Manchester United, but if the Scot still wished that he was in charge on Tyneside, the familiar sight of Newcastle’s defenders producing the kind of high-calibre slapstick that would leave most comics green with envy will have convinced him that he is far better off out of the goldfish bowl.

This was a game that taught us very little but confirmed a great deal more. That Wayne Rooney operates on a different frequency to everyone else, that Park Ji Sung and Cristiano Ronaldo are still no nearer to becoming the new Ryan Giggs and David Beckham, that Ruud van Nistelrooy should not be warming the United bench and that talk of Newcastle’s renaissance has been greatly exaggerated.

Newcastle may have won five and drawn one of their seven games since Glenn Roeder took temporary charge, but that cannot mask the fact that Souness’s ghost still looms large over a team who require significant surgery in the summer, not least at the back, where Boumsong, in particular, continues to plumb new depths of incompetency, even if he was overshadowed on this occasion by Ramage.

The defence was not abetted by a non-existent midfield at Old Trafford, but then they still managed to do most of the damage themselves, as Ramage illustrated quite blatantly in the eighth minute, when his atrocious back-pass handed Rooney his first Barclays Premiership goal of the year.

New (caretaker) manager, same miserable mistakes. “He has done terrifically (of late),” Roeder said of Ramage. “I said to him, ‘You now have to be very brave, accept it was a mistake, don’t hide away (which he won’t), stand up to be counted, want to be in the team and have a great game against Liverpool.’ It’s a test of character for him now.”

Ramage will recover — and there is no doubting he is a better player than this — but Boumsong is beyond recovery and should be the first to make way for new blood before next season.

Rooney has shown up far better defenders, admittedly, but Newcastle’s failings in central defence continue to breed panic throughout the team. It is not simply a case of lacking the necessary concentration, but the likes of Boumsong and Celestine Babayaro could do worse than look at how a greater focus has benefited Wes Brown’s game.

For all his qualities, the United defender often let himself down with lapses of concentration at crucial moments in matches, but having worked hard to improve that area of his game, Brown — exemplary again yesterday — is finally developing into the world-class defender Sir Alex Ferguson always believed he would become. How Newcastle wish they could say the same of some their defenders.