Thursday, March 27, 2008

Viva Ronaldo!



Just in the nick of time, the Stretford End has found its voice and the season has found its anthem. Over the last couple of years, the United songbook has gone stale to say the least. True last year we revelled in ‘Mourinho are you listening?’, but since then, nothing of any note has been added to the repertoire. Or nothing of positive note anyway.

What we have seen are two songs that serve to illuminate the absolute poverty of wit and imagination that defines too much of the United support these days. Exhibit A; The dirge-like serenading of the magnificent Anderson to the ‘tune’ of Liverpool/Murderers. Everytime this gets an airing I’m compelled to hang my head in shame. This isn’t the nadir though. The pinnacle of idiocy was attained through the moronic, racist chant about Adebayor that has been doing the rounds in recent months.

The dark stain of racism at Old Trafford is something that is rarely discussed these days, but anyone over thirty will attest to the fact that racism flowed thick and fast from the Stretford End in the dark days of the early 80’s. But if we hoped we’d seen the back of such fuckwittery we reckoned without some of the simpletons that have latched onto United in recent years. While I don’t expect all United fans to subscribe to the Guardian, I do expect them to behave with a little bit of class, and the Adebayor song needs dumping quick.

Thankfully, Anderson is the recipient of a more welcome song in the shape of that Agadoo tune that is doing the rounds. Now, for fans that have used the template of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ and ‘This Is How It Feels’ for tunes in the past, to be ripping off Black Lace feels slightly wrong, but there’s no disguising the fact that this song is worlds apart from the lobotomised repetition of ‘Anderson, Anderson…’

As for ‘Viva Ronaldo’, the class of this one shows in the way its quickly made the transition from away support to home, even supplying the United Review with its coverline last week, and already being picked up on by the ever alert Daniel Taylor in the Guardian. Now if only the lad himself can do in Rome what Fabregas did in Milan and define himself by his deeds on the biggest of stages…

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