What fickle creatures we football fans are. Last Saturday, Ferguson was booed off the pitch, by Wednesday he was getting a standing ovation. Many understandably find it hard to cut the cord that joins them to the manager who has won everything. But scraping past Benfica cannot disguise the fact that something is wrong. Targeting Queiroz is easier than calling for Ferguson’s increasingly red head.

Even if he did not actually call United fans stupid, the feeling persists that the highhanded Queiroz takes us for mug punters who cannot understand the evidence of our eyes, dismissing all criticism of the turgid tactics and suicidal waste of Wayne Rooney that has made United’s football look about as free-flowing as American football (the Glazers at least must feel at home).

While Ferguson lines up Queiroz as his anointed successor, it appears to some that he has retired already. According to Ryan Giggs’s autobiography, Queiroz been given the responsibility to “train us, prepare us for games, organise the team and decide the things we need to work on”. Since writing that, Giggs has curiously been left out of the team — further fuel for conspiracy theories.

But we should be wary of making the engineer’s oily rag the scapegoat. Ferguson remains the manager and he is now the biggest part of the problem. The Stretford End can sing “Stand up if you love Fergie” if they want, but from where I sit in the North Stand, somebody needs to stand up and tell him: “Thanks for everything, but it is past time to go” — and to take his assistant with him.

The fed-up contributors to fans’ messageboards who describe them as a collective entity called Fergoz have probably got it right. What we need now is not continuity and an easy succession, but revolution and a new Fergie-style dynasty.

Back in Star Trek, both the dictator and his deputy were gone by the end of the episode. We might not have a Captain Kirk to sort everything out, but we have got Captain Keano. After exploring the football universe, maybe he will return to Planet United to build a new civilisation. In the meantime, we can hope only that the other-worldly talents of our young stars are not destroyed. Beam us up, Rooney.