Monday, April 25, 2011

So, farewell then @dgibbo28

So, where were you when you heard the news? Still out on the lash, basking in the sun and the warm glow of another late Chicharito winner? Slumped in front of Britain’s Got Talent, wondering what kind of morons actually watch this stuff (you weren’t watching it of course, it just happened to be on)? Or, perhaps you were glued to Sky Sports News, where I wouldn’t be surprised if the event wasn’t announced via the yellow-ticker scrolling across the foot of the screen. What event? Wayne Rooney’s arrival on twitter of course.


At this point it’s customary for me to apologise for yet another twitter-themed post and to think back to the NME letters page of the late 80’s and 90’s which would invariably feature some waggish correspondent wondering if it wasn’t time the publication just changed its name to New Morrissey Express and had done with it. In which spirit, it might be time I just changed the title of the blog to United Road – Tweet Me Home or something. Apology done, back to the theme.

Wayne’s debut was conducted in now familiar fashion. Embarrassed first couple of tweets in which he explained that he’d finally succumbed and give him time to find his feet, soon followed-up by shout-outs to various acquaintances. Before long, confidence, and with it confidences of one kind or another, were flowing and we were granted a privileged glimpse of life chez Rooney. All with a flagrant disregard for the conventions of spelling and punctuation that were manna to his legion of critics.

Rooney’s twitter debut was sandwiched between the recent-ish arrival of Nani and Micheal Owen, and the subsequent one of Darron Gibson. Not hard to guess which of these will accrue the most followers in the weeks to come (presumably the source of much bragging around Carrington these days). In these particular stakes, Wayne (on 188, 413) still has a bit of catching up to do if he wants to surpass the twit-father himself Rio (841, 166).

Question is what do they, and we, expect to get out of their being on twitter? First thing they can look forward to of course is an avalanche of abuse courtesy of cyber warriors emboldened by the shield of their avatars. Darron Gibson joined twitter earlier today. A quick @dgibbo28 search, offers a pretty unedifying glimpse into the abyss of banality. Or rather it doesn’t. Not two hours after going up, his account was deleted, presumably to spare him having to wade through all the malice being directed his way. Actually, I found this pretty surprising assuming that most reds would just relish the chance to tweet ‘shooo(repeat ‘o’ for what’s left of your 140 characters) at him. Clearly not.

Gibson’s quickly removed toe, might deter team-mates, particularly messrs Carrick, Bebe and Obertan, from taking the plunge into twitter’s murky waters. Should we regard this as a shame? That depends. On my most recent visit to twitter, I learned that Wayne is getting ready to watch the Blackburn v city game and has invited his followers to predict the score. At moments like that, there’s an inescapable melancholy around twitter. You get the sense of lonely people reaching out through the ether to other lonely people. And even lonelier ones blogging about it at length a few hours later as if it has some profound sociological significance.

Don’t believe me about the loneliness thing? Just follow former United striker Guiseppe Rossi for a while and glimpse the void at the heart of the gilded cage that is the footballer’s existence. Most of his tweets seem to be about his immense boredom, asking people what they’re doing with their time so he has a clue what to do with his.

Some argue that twitter is breaking down barriers between players and fans, barriers thought to have been reinforced by the increasingly super-injuncted, hyper-privileged lifestyles that players lead. I see a bit of this. For some reason unfathomable even to me, I find myself following Bolton’s Kevin Davies. He seems a decent guy. Plays with the kids. Looks after his horses. Watches the match. All pretty mundane (if having your own stables can be considered mundane). Will I be less inclined to yell abuse at him next time he’s backing into Patrice Evra? Probably not.

Tweeting footballers have their moments. Last week, Michael Owen whiled away the longeurs of the return trip from Newcastle by debating his time at Newcastle and his attitude to the press with the Mirror’s Oliver Holt with a candour you rarely find. At the other extreme you have the embarrassment of Rio ‘bantering’ with uber-twat Piers Morgan and urging his ‘twitfam’ to get manboobs trending. Laugh? No, me neither.

Opportunities to hear what players actually think are limited. In pre and post-match interviews they serve up thoroughly predictable clichés and banalities. Most interviews are merely PR obligations for whichever boot/computer game/energy drink the publicist wants shoehorned into the piece. They rarely make for a fascinating, edifying read. You can argue why should they and why should we expect them to. Players like Roy Keane and Ruud van Nistelroy (himself a tweeter these days), with opinions and the capability to articulate them, are a rarity. Others, Joey Barton for example, offer top value in interviews, but, Beady Eye-like, can’t live up to their own rhetoric.

What Gibson himself makes of today’s events we’ve yet to learn. Rio, unsurprisingly has tweeted his two’pennorth, claiming that it wasn’t the abuse that scared him away more the general hassle of monitoring his feed (there’s a gag in there somewhere). United fans who admire the view from the moral high ground and with nothing better to do on a bank holiday found plenty to opine about. And the whole thing killed a bit of time that we could all have spent doing far more meaningful things. And if that’s not what twitter is ultimately for, I don’t know what it is.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Shades of Red

If the posts on this blog have a connecting thread it’s this: the lingering fear that, as red as I am, I’m not quite red enough. Being a solipsistic soul, happy to while away endless hours in self-scrutiny and navel-gazing, I’ve got no end of explanations for this. I’m pretty sure I’ve explored many of them on here before, but it’s worth watching the highlights at x30 again. Never been abroad to see United. (Unless, you’re counting Wales, but the Millenium is hardly Moscow or the Mestalla is it, and what’s more I was on a club coach and in the company of the wife). Not Euro away fare in other words. Name any away ground in the country, and unless it’s in Bolton or Blackburn, I won’t have seen United play there. (Unless it also happens to be Maine Road, Boundary Park or Deepdale, and they were all pre-season friendlies). Not looking good for my redness here is it? And I’m not from Manchester either.


It gets worse before it gets better. Are you ready for this? The first time I saw Eric play in the flesh was that Munich anniversary game. Inexcusable really (unless I had the excuse of being born in 1993 which, I quite clearly don’t). How can I live with myself? More pertinently, how can I happily (if sporadically) tend a blog devoted to United where I often pontificate on the ‘correct’ way to support United? Erm...can I get back to you on that?

Not really. I don’t need to duck the question. Having broke down my credibility, let’s have a crack at it from the other direction, and try building it up again. Fell in love with United on FA Cup Final Day 1979, aged 7. Same day they broke my heart (or Alan Sunderland and that bloody perm of his did anyway). Went to my first game (Everton at home, midweek, 0-0) in 1979. Second game better: Andy Ritchie scored hat-trick against Leeds. This was more like it.

Remember my Mum coming upstairs one night to tell me it had just been on the news that United had sacked Dave Sexton. Remember crying at this news. Don’t remember why. Sister took me about once a month then. Then she got married and my Mum took me. Then, when I was about 12, Mum decided I was big enough to go on my own. If I wasn’t the first on the Stretford End every other Saturday I was one of them. And if wasn’t the skinniest and slightest on the Stretford End every other Saturday, I was one of them. By three my dazzling view of the pitch had shrunk to postage-stamp size, at best. Didn’t matter. I loved being part of that roiling ocean of red humanity, particularly when caught by the current of celebration, swept along to land god knows where.

At first, Mum thought I was too young (and too weedy probably) to go alone midweek. Never did get to see Barcelona in 1984. Don’t bear grudges much, and Barcelona in 2008 and was pretty special and I was there for that. The weird thing is, during all this time, I never went to the game with anyone. At the time this never felt that odd. I was from Oldham and there were surprisingly few reds around our way at the time, nor were there many at school who had Mum and Dad’s blessing to go to Old Trafford on a regular basis (remember this was the 80’s and all that entailed, and United were still tainted with the Red Army 70’s vibe and all that entailed). I swing between gratitude at the fact my parents trusted me to go, and the desire to retrospectively shop them to Childline for such flagrant lack of parental solicitude.

In time, a couple of other lads would start going too, one every game, one just now and again. Sometimes we’d bump into each other on the 182. Sometimes we wouldn’t. It didn’t seem to bother us either way. What it meant, is that I never became part of a United gang, my matchday rituals were all of a solitary nature (ah, but what rituals aren’t when you’re 15?). A change came when a lad at the shop where I did my papers (even Saturday nights, straight off the 24, doing the Pinks, amazed that I could be reading about a game I was stood watching – or to be more precise, stood in near proximity to – just over an hour ago), started offering me his Grandad’s seat in H stand.

It meant leaving the Stetford End, which was sad, but it meant being sat immediately behind the United Road end, which wasn’t. Even better, for some games, the away end would creep round the corner in our direction and we’d get visiting supporters right beneath us. I have a memory from about 1989 (I almost don’t want to set it right and sully it by looking it up on google) of a late winner against Liverpool, when they were utterly dominant, me stood on my chair, jubilant, scores of scousers beneath, baying for blood and throwing anything they could lay hands on at us. Don’t judge me, but there aren’t many moments in life when I can say I was as truly, joyfully, exultantly as happy as then.

And then I drifted away. Loads of reasons. Saturday job. The Stone Roses. No trophies and to be honest no sign of any. Went off to University, barely even bothering to notice results most of the time. Never even occurred to me go back to Old Trafford when I was back home. But I remember taking a break from revising for my finals one Sunday afternoon to listen to Oldham play Aston Villa. And I remember shedding a few tears when it ended. And more the next night when I was in some bar in Newcastle in the company of some reds, singing every song we could remember from our times on the terrace. Geordies looking on, realising there was little glory to be had in picking on a bunch of specky twats like that. Thank god.

And in time I drifted back. The odd game at first. Then the bug bit. Season ticket. The odd away – but only ever Bolton or Blackburn – oh, and Villa Park too, where I saw Ian Brown, rocking along with a simian stroll only the finest primates can master. Anyway, have my red credentials been re-established yet? Hopefully.

These days, the season ticket has gone back and, for a multitude of reasons I’ve drifted away again. Mortgage to pay. Family. PIK loans. Those sort of reasons. But in many ways, my redness hasn’t wavered in the way it did last time. How could it? I’m here writing this. If I wasn’t, I’d probably be looking at twitter where half my timeline is clogged by United related items of varying degrees of interest.

So why the anxiety and insecurity? It’s not just the not going. In some ways, and I’ve argued this myself, right now not attending OT is the truest measure of redness, your stomach for staying away the litmus test of how much you really want the Glazer’s to fuck-off, no matter what the colour of your scarf says otherwise. No, I’m pinning the blame – and if you’ve followed these posts, you might have expected this – on twitter.

What did you do last night? Me, I watched Cemetery Junction. Not bad. Nothing special. Female characters sketchily drawn to put it mildly. Gervais too happy to retreat into his usual (dis)comfort zone for my liking, all that ironic-racist shite, the nagging old-gran, like it’s On the Buses or something. Looked like he couldn’t decide what he was doing with the main character. Stuck on that Tim and Dawn from the Office-type romance. Watchable though.

Only, I know that, if I want to call myself any kind of red, I should have been doing nothing of the sort. I should have been at OT watching the youth team in action against Chelsea (I mean, you can’t seriously uphold a boycott for a game that costs 3quid can you?). You can? Well then I should have been tuned into some stream or other (obviously MUTV is a no-no). Or, at the very least, I should have been watching via twitter (it’s the new ceefax don’tchaknow) where no shortage of those I follow where filing 140 character dispatches at staggeringly frequent intervals. (I know this because I trawled through them after the film, when I should have been watching Spurs v Arsenal).

I know, because many of those I follow on twitter do, that I should have a workable opinion on Will Keane and any of the other members of the youth team who aren’t Ravel Morrison (everyone has an opinion on him). Thing is, I’m just not that interested. Fleet Foxes have a new album due in a couple of weeks. I’m looking forward to it immensely. But I’m not fussed about hearing the demo’s for the album, I want to hear the finished deal. I feel the same about youth football. I want the finished, produced album, not the rough and ready works in progress. Though it’s not surprising that the internet should be overrun with reds of a more completist, geekier persuasion. I just can’t find it in myself to join them, so I find myself staring into my navel and trying to gauge the degree of redness I see.

So, in summary. Youth team played. Didn’t watch it. Wrote about this at length. The end.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

#mufc...ok?

Warning: This is yet another post on here in which twitter will play a prominent role. Time was when the biggest influence on my perspective on red-related matters was the view from my seat in N43, alas, no longer. These days, it’s an armchair view, with the chorus of cynicism, doom-mongering and rampant Scousophobia formerly provided by those in surrounding seats now coming direct from my mobile courtesy of twitter. It’s company I suppose, but it leaves a strange taste in the mouth.


On one level , it’s not that dissimilar to the experience of taking your seat and nodding to the usual faces. Some of them you know the names of, some of them told you their names a few seasons ago, but you’ve since forgot and it seems a touch off to ask them at this late stage particularly when they remember yours you rude bastard. Some of them you’ve even got their number in your mobile from when they sorted you out with aways and you reciprocated by letting them use your number for a Wembley trip you weren’t doing. Same faces mostly, stretching out in all four directions, the odd unfamiliar one slotted here and there, other obligations taking precedence for once. A community of sorts.

Do you get community on twitter? Of a fashion. Familiar names and faces – though these are faces squashed into minute avatar size. Any nodding as you take your seat? Not much. Instead for ninety minutes you hurl comments out into the digital void, but you rarely hear them make a splash. And your eyes flick towards the phone and you watch others do the same. Some amuse, many irritate. Often you find yourself struggling to beat down the thought , ‘Shouldn’t you be at – or at the very least watching – the game, seeing as you style yourself as the toppermost of top reds?’. Inevitably the devil on your other shoulder fires back the thought, ‘Shouldn’t you?’

You get this alot with twitter. It alarms you the degree to which some are consumed by United. When do you start wondering what team Fergie’s going to put out for a particular game? With me, it’s from about two minutes after I take my seat in front of the game. Not on twitter. Here, hours, sometimes days before, and people are pondering the permutations at Fegie’s disposal. Needless to say, when the team is announced, it’s the wrong one. I mean, really, isn’t it time Fergie was replaced by some crowd-sourcing app that picked the team for him?

Which brings me to another problem with twitter; the rampant self-regard. Naturally, I have to own up to the corollary that freights all these frets, namely, that as a tweeter and occasional blogger, I’m thoroughly contaminated with the same virus, but still. I get the feeling that some, and this is as a phrase I abhor, ‘prominent bloggers’, have risen to the status of spokepeople for all reds. And I want to know: who are you and who elected you our leader? (worrying possible answer: me when I clicked follow?).

I have no such fears with fanzines. They’re visibly there every game and have been for years. And it takes a damn sight more effort to get a fanzine together than it does to log on to wordpress or blogger. (And again, the pot can hear the kettle whispering that it isn’t red enough for his liking). Maybe I’m just peeved at my relatively miniscule following or the fact that this blog attracts so little by way of comments. Maybe.

Call me ‘old media’ but when you write a United blog and tweet incessantly about #mufc then I like to think you might have put in a few hours actually following them in the non-passive sense of the word. But if you’ll excuse me now, there’s about 83 people I need to inform why Fergie should be fired if he doesn’t start with Anderson in centre-mid tonight.