After the strike That Never Was by England's elite footballers - peeved at the perceived mistreatment of their air-headed friend Rio Ferdinand - the question everyone is asking again, from fans to pundits to the powerbrokers themselves, is: Who is mightier, Manchester United or England.
For the moment, the Football Association have seen off the richest club in world sport.
But United will come again. Their commercial well-being dictates that their interests will always override those of the England team. And, as the shares raiders from Ireland and the United States were clearing out Sky from the Old Trafford boardroom last week, it was not fanciful to imagine the future regime being as ruthless as the incumbent clique, whose intransigence and paranoia over even the temporary loss of their £30 million player inspired a ham-fisted response to what ought to have been a minor embarrassment.
As Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association, said in one of his many interviews: 'I told the FA they were entering a minefield in taking on a club like Manchester United and the England players. It was not his finest moment.
'This is a fight between a limited company and an organising body, not just a football club and England,' is how the Sports Minister Richard Caborn more aptly described it.
That much became crystal clear when the FA approached United last Monday to broker a compromise in the row over Ferdinand's suspension for 'forgetting' to take a drugs test. United responded angrily to the suggestion that the player hold his hands up and accept his suspension. Instead of taking on board this reasonable counsel in the interests of an untroubled preparation for yesterday's important game, the club, according to the FA, said that they would withdraw their four remaining players in the England squad to play Turkey. This lends credence to the theory that it was United's Gary Neville who led the clumsiest insurrection since the Gunpowder Plot.
How ironic it was, also, that Neville should co-opt his best friend, David Beckham, in giving authority to the mutiny and thus seriously embarrass the England head coach, Sven-Göran Eriksson, who had confirmed Beckham as captain when he took over the team. It was Beckham's profile at Old Trafford, as husband of a pop star and captain of the national team, that contributed in no small way to Sir Alex Ferguson selling him to Real Madrid in the summer. And Ferguson struggles to disguise his enmity towards Eriksson, who was strongly rumoured to be taking over at Old Trafford before Ferguson signed his new contract.
As the uprising faltered and Beckham uttered dutiful noises in a stilted press conference on Friday afternoon, reassuring the nation that he and his players were totally committed to the England cause, moves were being made to paper over the row between club and country. A phone conversation that morning between David Gill and Mark Palios, respectively the chief executives of United and the FA, sought to 'take the heat out' of a row the rest of the football world finds farcical.
And did it? 'I understand it went well,' says Patrick Harverson, the United media director. 'We wanted to assure the FA that some of the more excitable stories in the press about our suing them and refusing to host England at Old Trafford simply were not true. We do want to take it further, but in discussions about the process [over suspensions]. I think David's assurances took the heat out of the situation.
Not judging by developments in Istanbul yesterday, when the FA let it be known that they are considering legal action against United unless Gill withdraws some of the inflammatory remarks he made against the governing body last week.