United Road Take Me Home

Hush

So this minutes silence then. Our old friend Kevin Parker popped up in the media on Monday to urge United to rethink the silence due to be held before the forthcoming derby clash. Following chants of ‘We’re all going to the silver jubilee!’ at recent city games, Parker is understandably concerned that some bitters will gleefully wreck the tribute, and in doing so smear the good name enjoyed by city fans – his words not mine – and trigger god knows what reprisals from United.

Quite rightly, United knocked back the suggestion that this most solemn of occasions be marked with a minutes worth of applause instead, and we await February 10h itself to see how this one will play out.

While it’s tempting in this situation to just invite the city fans to show what they’re made of one way or another, I can’t help feeling that many United fans are relishing the prospect of a desecrated silence. Should a single blue voice be raised during that minute – and I’m pretty sure that more than a few will be – you’ll be able to taste the hatred in the air when the ref blows his whistle and the vitriol explodes. In recent times, few occasions at home will have touched it for a genuine, almost toxic sense of malice permeating the ground. Bearing in mind recent atmospheres, even in supposed grudge games, you can see why that might prove attractive.

And let’s be honest, there’s nowhere United fans feel more at home than on the moral high ground. Munich has always been the inarguable ace allowing us to justify any number of wrongs when it comes to songs. ‘Always look out for Turks wielding knives’? They started it with Munich. ‘City’s going down like a Russian submarine’? What about their Munich stuff? And, of course, Hillsborough, and further back, ‘Bill Shankly’s on his back’. Sick? What does that make their Munich songs?

While we wait to condemn city fans, it’s interesting to wonder how we’d conduct ourselves in a similar situation. Say we’re at Anfield around April 15th next year (the 20th Anniversary) is anyone really confident that every single United fan could be trusted to hold their tongues? It’s a view guaranteed to make me unpopular, but as far as I’m concerned as long as we sing ‘Murderers’ at anyone who ever put on a Liverpool shirt, then we’ve surrendered any right to occupy the moral high ground. Don’t agree? Sit and watch Jimmy McGovern’s ‘Hillsborough’ and see if you can still sing it then. Oh, but it’s about Heysel? That’s alright then. And so on.

So for me, I’ll howl along with everyone else when the city fans soil the silence, but I’ll do so believing that if it was us, we probably wouldn’t acquit ourselves that much better.

posted by Royton Red @ 10:02 PM