Champions of the world, that’s who.

I’m elated. Celebrated Rooney’s goal like a loon. There’s been a lot of cynicism towards the merits of this tournament, mostly from bitter rivals – who’d secretly love to have the chance to be there – but disappointingly from United fans as well. I don’t know whether it’s just snobbery or an insular parochial view to football in general, but it’s unjustified.

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It was as I said yesterday. The unforgiving nature of the Christmas schedule lends itself to games that call for a good old fashioned scrap fest. Teams will come to Old Trafford, dig themselves a nice trench, build a wall and sit sipping some classic blend of English tea.

Of course, that doesn’t mask the fact that there are problems in the side — the lack of ability to put the ball in the net being just one of them.

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United play their second game of the Christmas programme after returning as ‘Champions of the World’ from Japan. Thankfully, our clear dominance was rewarded against the joke of a team that was Stoke City — cue, ‘brave Stoke’s hearts broken’, and more such tripe from the rags. It was just the sort of win we needed after returning from a gruelling schedule. And I would gladly take these kinds of wins right through this Christmas/New Year period. It’s like one of those bitter pills — you know it’s hard to swallow but you do so anyway because it’s going to be for the greater good. So I’ll be prepared to sit through periods of push, prod, huff and puff that my beloved team is offering for now with the hope that we’ll inch closer to Liverpool and, hopefully, ahead of Chelsea.

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Rooney scored the only goal of the game in the 73rd minute and Van der Sar denied Quito with quality saves to crown Manchester United as World Champions and officially the best club football team in the world (we already were, but it’s nice to have FIFA and UEFA bowing down to us, don’t you think?).

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Manchester United take on Liga de Quito at the Yokohama International Stadium in 3 hours to play the Club World Cup final.

You like it, you don’t like it, it doesn’t matter anymore because in 5 hours or so we’ll either be World Champions (and the first British club to win the title) or the laughing stock of England because mark my words, while everyone puts down this competition, the moment United slip up we’re going to get pilloried with jibes of ‘you couldn’t beat the Mexicans’ and what not.

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Much (MUCH!) has been made out of yesterday’s Champions League playoff draw and much more will be said between today and February when the damned matches actually start.

Are Inter going to be too much for United? Will Jose beat Fergie again? Will Arsenal and Chelsea fall to the Italian revolution (or some such nonsense)? Can Madrid stand the might of the great Rafa?

Please. Get a fucking grip. Two seasons ago this time around Barcelona and Liverpool were paired together in the round of 16, with FCB in blistering form and Pool dithering around like only they can. Come February it had all changed with Barcelona stuttering and literally defeating themselves while Liverpool kept their heads and took their chances.

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I couldn’t catch it live. And watching the whole match on tape, with prior knowledge of the result, can do only so much to the excitement a live match can generate.

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It’s the semi-finals of the World Club Championship — a tournament, despite my being happy if we lift the cup, I couldn’t care less about.

To me, it’s a big distraction with an already crowded league schedule. The timing is most ill-advised with a jam packed Christmas schedule, and we are still playing catch up in the league despite slip ups by Chelsea and Liverpool.

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Red Rants is looking to open up to the community to post on the main blog in the form of a competition. The best two (or three) bloggers, at the end of this competition will get to blog on RR for a year. Of course, there are rules for this, for which you’ll have to read on.

1) Number of Entries: One entry per person.

2) Size: There will not be word limits, but you wouldn’t want to send in two small paragraphs for consideration either.

3) Kind of pieces: We will not consider match reports or match previews. Opinion pieces/research pieces — stuff that add insight — are the kind we are looking for. If you can write good opinion pieces, it wouldn’t be a stretch to write a match report. So having insightful articles rather than routine match reports will be the way to go about it. Although, if you can write a really funny match report/preview then do feel free to send it in. (Of course, you have to be really sure that your piece is funny enough.)

4) Quality: We do set a high bar for quality. So language, writing style, grammar and spellings do matter. And so will be the formatting — in terms of paragraph sizes (not fancy fonts). In short, when we publish your submission, we will not have to do formatting work on it. It has to be good to go on the site.

5) Editorial vision and discretion: And finally the most important thing to note. This site was set up as a fan blog for Manchester United. While the comments section does allow freedom of opinions, there is an editorial vision as far as content goes on the main blog. While I may not necessarily have to agree with what goes on the main blog, I will not give posts that reek of venom about the club/players much space. Insightful reasoning about the team’s deficiencies can be acceptable, but extremely abrasive tone that attempts to hide behind supposed excuses like “this is a rant site” and “freedom of speech” will not work here. If there is unreasonable venom, and we define what is “unreasonable” here then it will not be published and we do not have to offer any explanation. Constructive criticism is allowed — the rest is upto your skill as a writer to be able to warp the criticism in a level headed manner.

6) Relevance: An ammendment/additional rule, this. We want your pieces to be relevant when it goes to print. While timeless pieces such as an ode to a player — past or present — or an assessment of United squads would work, make sure that if you are sending a piece you’ve written a few aeons ago, the references used in the post wouldn’t sound out of place today. In short, we’d prefer fresh pieces but if there are articles that can be relevant to date, then it’ll work. I hope this makes sense.

The posts will be published if they meet our criteria, and will be decided by an independent panel. So don’t send me emails if your entry doesn’t cut it. We will look to run this competition for a month from today. We may extend it if we receive more worthy entries.

To send your posts, use the contact form or alternatively, send them to redrants [at] gmail [dot] com. For the technologically challenged, replace [at] with @ and [dot] with . — your subject line should be titled “Red Rants Writing Competition”. You can either attach your piece as a txt file or put it in the body of the email with the article title. Do remember to let us know your name — if you want an alias to sign off your article with or your real name.