United Road Take Me Home

So four days on from Black Sunday and up pops Rio in the paper with the usual platitudes about the players being determined to bounce back and put the nightmare behind them and blah blah blah. Excuse my cynicism Rio, but the sense of disillusion inspired by Sunday has yet to abate round these parts. Indeed my mood was hardly helped by the discovery that instead of spending Monday dishing out well-deserved bollockings at Carrington and doing some revision of the fundamentals of defending, Ferguson was in South Africa whoring up trade for the Summer Tour.

This only a matter of days after the Premier League has decided that it ‘owes it’ to its fans abroad to separate them from more of their money. From the minute that Gridiron game touched down at Wembley, you could see the dollar, yen and rupee signs glittering in the eyes of Premier League overlords. At the time The Observer ran a series that read like a horrible dystopian fantasy of sport’s future in which games are played all across the globe at the behest of television. Horribly prescient and horribly plausible.

This while we’re still coming to terms with the fact that United – as the season moves towards its most critical phase – fly off to give credibility to a morally repugnant regime in exchange for a million quid. And that firebrand shop steward from Govan says nowt about it. Not quite accurate, as in truth he utters some weasel words in defence of the trip that serve simply to ram home the contempt with which he’s happy to treat us.

Of course when the millions start tipping into the coffers from these not at all debilitating to form and health jaunts abroad, I’m sure that Glazers will whittle a chunk off the price of tickets won’t they?

All things considered, I think it might be time to think about not renewing.