United Road Take Me Home

August 2003, United v Bolton. United’s new signing, successor to the recently departed David Beckham, trots up and down the touchline waiting to make his entrance. His reputation is impressive, but in the eyes of the OT crowd, they have to be earned anew, particularly if you want to be thought worthy of that Number 7 shirt.
Within seconds of receiving the ball, he’s teasing and taunting the opposition, spinning away from defenders, streaking down the wing.

It’s a mesmerising, unforgettable little cameo and it has an intoxicating effect on the crowd. Like many others, I floated out of Old Trafford that afternoon, any worries that Fergie had discarded the previous No. 7 prematurely, utterly obliterated in 20 sublime minutes of football.

Cut to Gelsenkirchen 2006, and that same figure, now fully known to us, in all his sometimes exhilarating, sometimes frustrating majesty, gives a conspiratorial wink as his OT colleague Wayne Rooney is dismissed from the pitch. Probably in common with most United fans who affect to despise the national team, I was less than impressed with Ronnie’s behaviour; though being honest I’d have loved it if it was Gerrard or Lampard getting sent-off.

Fade to last season and you can pick any number of mesmerising moments, but I’ll take the magisterial way in which he rose into the Rome sky and headed United in front in the Champions League Quarter-Final. And yet, and yet…I’m still niggled by the memory of him throwing his arms down in a huff at the JJB, all that petulant, ‘how dare you challenge me?’ stuff that continues to blight his game.

When it comes to Ronaldo, adoration and ambivalence have always been locked in competition, and now as he seems to be manoeuvring towards an exit from OT, like most United fans I’m saddened, but not really surprised, and I won’t feel the visceral level of dismay that I did when Keano, Ruud and even Jaap Stam moved on. Truth be told, no one ever really thought that United had penetrated to the core of Ronaldo in the way it clearly has with players like Rooney, Vidic, and even Rio.

Ferguson is rightly affronted, but even he sensed – with his admission that he expected to struggle to retain Ronnie in two or three years time – that being a United legend was never going to be sufficient for an ego the size of Ronaldo’s. So we’ll cherish the memories of those scorching free-kicks, those extravagant flicks and step-overs, and those screaming runs down the wing, but we won’t shed any tears as we await the inevitable kissing of the Madrid badge next season.

Who knows, perhaps he’s just missing Van Nistelrooy?

One of the more unexpected developments of the last season – a season in which we won the league and the European Cup since I last updated this blog, in case you missed the news – was the sight of the Stretford End being transformed into a blur of red and white as thousands of scarves were twirled aloft as the visual accompaniment to the season’s anthem ‘Viva Ronaldo’. Only the most curmudgeonly of spirit couldn’t admit that it makes for quite the spectacle. Could we, after many years of muted shades, be about to see the return of colours to the United end? And if so, is it something to be celebrated or another manifestation of corporate tackiness taking hold?

It’s been a while since I turned up to watch United in colours. In fact, I never really have done. I was about 12 when I started making solo trips from Oldham to Old Trafford – to this day I pine for the flutter of butterflies in the stomach as the 24 passed the old Daily Express building and the excitement really started to mount. This would have been about 1983/84, dark days on the pitch, and even more moody off them. My Mum had strictly forbidden me from wearing my United gear – and being 12 I had everything, full tracksuit included – to the match. This wasn’t because she was already clued up about the sartorial codes of the United casuals and didn’t want her little precious scoffed at by the terrace fashion tsars; no, she simply assumed that wearing a United shirt in broad daylight was an invitation to get pulverised. (To her credit, this hasn’t really changed. She’ll still sometimes phone after games to make sure I made it home safe. And it’s not like I’ve just been to Rome or something. This could be after Fulham at home.)

So from my earliest days at Old Trafford I’ve shunned the shirt as my attire of choice, preferring to pledge my allegiance through the tiniest of pin badges. The moodiness of the 80’s has abated now of course. Away fans are free to wander down Warwick Road openly singing their songs and wearing their shirts, and this, I suppose is progress and a Good Thing. (Not that I’m advocating such people being slapped, and I for one, a fully-paid up Guardian reader am not the one to dole out said slaps, but surely a decorum must be observed; a decorum that idiots like the group of Villa Fans who chanted ‘Fuck-off back to London’ all the way up Warwick Road last season, without a murmur of dissent, would surely benefit from a vigorous reminder of).

But even though Mum’s misgivings about my physical well-being are misplaced these days, old habits die hard and I simply couldn’t bring myself to be so flagrantly uncool as to wear the shirt to the game. Not that I’m so flagrantly cool as to not actually own several of the things. My wardrobe resembles an overspill exhibit from the United museum, with shirts of every vintage hanging proudly, none of which have ever or will ever see the light of Old Trafford. Shirts simply can’t be cool – even my personal favourite, the cool blue one that Keano wore to destroy Arsenal at Highbury in 99/00, the one I secretly think looks as good as anything Paul Smith designed in my wardrobe; even that can never really be cool. But what about scarves?

Not being Paul Weller, scarves don’t really have a place in my day-to-day wardrobe. I am not, to my eternal regret, the sort of gent who can carry off a scarf with dash and panache. Of course I have tried, and on every occasion I have failed miserably. Scarves and me just don’t get on. That said, United scarves have always been a staple presence in the drawer. To my regret, the scarf that saw me through my youth, never made it into adulthood, but I can recall the day it was bought, an 8th birthday trip to the Souvenir shop that also saw me buy my first album – a picture-disc of ‘Onwards Sexton’s Soldiers’, with the squad doing various covers of standards given a United or football related bent. To my regret, I do still have that, and it does still get played from time to time.

Nor do I still own, the silk scarf I inherited from my sister, purchased on a Friday in 1976, that proudly proclaims ‘United FA Cup Winners 1976’. No doubt the enterprising swag merchant who was poised to make a mint on the back of such an odds-on victory, mopped many a tear with those silk scarves, just like my sister did. But scarves are back in a big way.

It’s probable that many of those being raised to salute Ronnie, were the scarves distributed for the Munich memorial. At first, in the week after the game, I was a bit unsure about the number of people attending matches wearing theses scarves. I suspected something a bit mawkish and look-at-me about them. Was it any more than a way of telling the world ‘I was there!’ and I didn’t hawk mine on e-bay like those other vultures’? Did they never have scarves before this?

In time though, I softened, and as the season moved towards its climax and the memory of the Babes was honoured in the most fitting and poetic of ways, it started to seem appropriate for those scarves that honoured the dead to honour how their legacy is being carried today (we’ll politely draw a veil over his public flirtation with Madrid for now). When the request was made for reds to take scarves to the Barcelona game, I dug one out, and gave it a twirl, sheepishly at first, but with uninhibited gusto by the end, and I have to admit that it felt kind of good to be gleefully waving a scarf like it was 1985 all over again and we were on the march on with Ron’s army.

Still, part of me can’t help wondering if the return of colours to what I still can’t help calling the terraces, is symptomatic of the last vestiges of 80’s casual culture being eradicated and something new and less savvy sprouting in its place. That said, colours – mostly in the form of heavily nostalgic bar-scarves of the kind last seen in profusion at Blackburn a couple of seasons ago – were a feature at FC from day one, and, though many at Old Trafford would be unwilling to own up to being inspired by their former comrades, you have to feel it played a part.

If, next season, United’s support maintains this rediscovered fondness for colours, part of me will be disappointed. I always found it quietly satisfying when TV cameras panned across crowds and the colour and pageantry would be interrupted by a mass of black in the United end, it was a cool two-fingers to corporate, family-friendly, face-painted football, never more so than at Villa Park last year when to a man, woman and child, the Watford end was ablaze with yellow shirts, while the United end simply played it cool. So let’s take our scarves, and hoist them aloft, but let’s be casual about it, and remember that the only shirts on display at the game should be the ones on the pitch.