United Road Take Me Home

Less than 24 hours to go to the first derby of the season, and I'm sure that the residents of Stockport are already grooming their moustaches in anticipation - removing a few stray foodstuffs that have been lodging in the bristles for a couple of months while they're about it - as they ready themselves to show us what being a real football fan is all about. No doubt they will - hilariously - serenade us with cries of USA, and remind us that, courtesy of their wonky geography and skewed grasp of history, they are the only football team to come from Manchester.

Most amusingly, they will sing that nonsense about the invisible man and not being really here, the irony of the fact that, unless they're playing Man United, they very rarely are, being totally lost on the lazer blue brigade.

Indeed when I happened to flick on Sky on Monday night - part of a Clockwork Orange style attempt to make my daughter flinch at the merest glimpse of a blue shirt - I assumed that some sort of emergency evacuation of the ground was underway so vast were the expanses of empty seats. But it was raining. And it was a Monday night. And it was only Watford. And it's nearly Christmas. And did you know we once took 500,000 to Blackburn?

Of course it must be disappointing that city's efforts to rebrand themselves as the Britain's first green club - their commitment to recycling demonstrated in the continued employment of Paul Dickov who really ought to have been melted down for scrap by now - and Britain's first pink football club - feel free to insert your own Nicky Weaver joke here - are not paying off at the turnstile. The sad fact is that until they rebrand themselves as something other than the most turgid and unwatchable side in Britain, the seats are likely to remain unoccupied. Until we turn up to win the league in May that is.

Needless to say the quality of football on display was utterly abysmal and, like most games involving city, stands as a useful corrective to anyone still inclined to recycle the clapped out idea that 'The Premiership is the best league in the world'. That said, in comparison to city's recent stodge-fest against Newcastle, the Watford game was as incandescently brilliant as West Germany V Italy in the summer.

So the form book - that handy rhetorical invention - suggests that annihalation is on the cards. So why do I feel ever so slightly jittery? Why have recent derbies been such frustrating affairs? Why do I have this fear that they'll be cavorting as they grab a point and celebrate like they've just heard it's two for one on stonewashed jeans at Matalan? Why do I have this dread that Alex will start with Kieran Richardson on the wing?

Here's hoping that my foreboding feelings are as misplaced as a Kieran Richardson pass and that come tomorrow afternoon it's a celebratory swig of mulled wine on Albert Square, and tears falling into taches the length and breadth of Stockport.