United Road Take Me Home

So, Sir Alex wasn't impressed with the performance of the United crowd for yesterday's game then. I could start by saying that now he knows what it feels like to be told to sit all the way through rather than be free to stand up and mouth off whenever you feel like it. Or perhaps wonder if this Sir Alex Ferguson is in anyway related to the Sir Alex Ferguson who famously declared that anyone not happy with the prices at Old Trafford should 'fuck-off to Chelsea', or join 'that mob at United FC'. Might it not have occured to him that alienating and disenfranchising the most vocal and vociferous element of your support was always going to lead to a dilution of atmosphere at games?

Of course it would be foolish to claim that the pre-Glazer Old Trafford was always a cauldron of noise and intimidation. Debate about torpid atmospheres raged long before they arrived and will do so long after the dirt has been tramped down on the troll's grave, but the scale of the problem does seem to be getting worse. These days even the fixtures that you could rely on for a bit of noise and passion, pass off in silence once the initial ten minute frenzy has died down. Take Chelsea this season. With Mourinho not yet even cold in his grave, you'd have thought that the United crowd would have savaged the opposition.

Not a bit of it. At times we could have been playing, well, Birmingham, for all the noise that failed to ascend from the crowd. As for big European nights, none of have happened this season yet, another victim of the way financial concerns trump all others in football these days. Still, when not singing about Steven Gerrard, the Stretford keeps imploring us to 'stand up for the Champions', a plea it made about 6 times again yesterday. It seems that it wasn't just the noise that left for Gigg Lane, but the wit and imagination that really ignited the crowd and made Old Trafford somewhere special.

So, sorry that we didn't come up to scratch yesterday boss. But perhaps an announcment on a freeze in ticket prices for a season or two, or scrapping of the Automatic Cup Scheme, might give us something to sing about.