This Manchester United team are great, but they'd be no match for turn-of-the-last-century footballing giants Bradford Dandelion & Burdock. While it's true that Sir Alex Ferguson's famed "floating triumvirate" (or triangoli da una mucca) of Ronaldo, Teves and Rooney enables the Red Devils to repeatedly outflank the Faustian compromise that is Arsène Wenger's libere a cuadrillas que vagan de bandidos malvados en burros, and Chelsea's rapidly-maturing gli uomini ricchi a ricerca di scopo e del significato, I still contend Fergie's boys would have a hard time if they fell into a distortion in the space-time continuum and found themselves playing against the fantastically-unlikely mélange of raw talent, tobacco-stained brawn and borderline insane tactical genius that was 1913s Burpers.
Formed 19 years earlier by the "grease men" (whose job it was to scrape out the sticky yellow residue left after sheep's wool was spun prior to combing in Bradford's many dark satanic wool mills), come 1913 Bradford Dandelion & Burdock dominated football North of the Wash.
I imagine that after some discussion about which set of laws the referee should impose - those of 1913, 2006 or some compromise where passing back to the keeper is forbidden but shoulder charging him into the net is allowed - the game would kick off with "the Pop" (as they were affectionately known) amused by the shortness of the Man Utd shorts and perhaps a little scared by Tevez and Rooney who, thanks to their lack of facial hair, they'd probably regard as a species of overly aggressive mill-lass.
Assuming a 3pm kick-off - as was traditional in 1913 - and assuming that the game took place on a not especially windy day, by 3.15pm, as was usual in Bradford (before the clean air act of 1958), a "Bradford stinker" - a thick, reeking, lung-shredding yellow sulphurous smog full of swirling, red-hot ashes large enough to take your eye out - would descend on the pitch; a fog from which the terrifying 0-0-10 Bradford formation would loom without warning - save the glowing tips of their pipes and unfiltered Park Drives.
I very much doubt the pink-lunged and lightly-booted prancing show ponies of the modern-day Manchester United would be able to withstand the onslaught. Were the game to take place at modern day Old Trafford, the fitter, non-smoking, three-square-meals-a-day eating, non-worm-infested and non-rickets-stricken modern United might have a chance.
But the stats tell us that between 1884 and 1914, Bradford Dandelion & Burdock never lost at Phlegm Lane, regularly trashing all-comers in the old West and North Riding of Yorkshire League, including such now-forgotten giants of the beautiful game as the Blubberhouses Attitude, the Skelmersdale Potency, the Giggleswick Revolution, the Baildon Benefit and the once legendary Eccleshall Bierlow Gentlemen Cyclists (winners of the now defunct Christendom Cup a record four times between 1892 and 1907).
This is, of course, all speculation. The day after the first world war broke out - July 29 1914 - the Burpers took on and thrashed the Skipton Cougars 8-3 in the final of what was then known as the League Cup. After the final whistle the team lined up in their famed 0-0-10 formations and marched 10-abreast (where the streets permitted) to the local recruiting office where they all (with the notable exception of 5ft 6in tall Andrew "Lofty" Hargreaves) joined the legendary Bradford Bantams - a regiment where every recruit was under 4'7" and cocky with it.
Alas at the year's Battle of the Marne the entire team were wiped out by a single German machine gun which they approached at a sensible walking pace, smoking, kicking a football with the Kaiser's face painted on it, and shouting huzzah.
Tragically, the same tactics that ensured victory at Phlegm Lane proved ineffective when used in brilliant sunshine against an enemy armed with modern weaponry, and not actually playing football. Alas both British football and the British army failed to draw the correct conclusions - or, indeed, any conclusions - from this tragedy.
In a bizarre coda, the club itself met a similar fate when a freak break in the smog in August 1916 allowed a lone Zeppelin bomber to destroy the already derelict Phlegm Lane North stand, boot room and home-team changing hut with incendiaries and high explosives. The ground was converted to allotments to aid the war effort - and slowly the greatest team in footballing history faded from memory.
And in an even more bizarre coda, in 1919 Andrew "Lofty" Hargreaves - the lone surviving Burper thanks to his height - was signed by Manchester United where he went on to become their highest ever scorer with 45 goals in the 1920-21 season - a record that was only broken in 1963-64 by Dennis Law. And might possibly be broken again by fanny-dancing Noddy lookalike Cristiano Ronaldo using a super light football without laces and playing on a croquet lawn where you can see one end of the pitch from the other and defenders actually get penalised if they kick you.
Somewhere the 10 ghosts of the Bradford Dandelion & Burdock are laughing. And then coughing. And then laughing again.
