United Road Take Me Home

Half and Half

2012-01-08T10:45:00.000+01:00

So here we go again. Another crisis, another crossroads,another x on the graph marking the inexorable ascendancy of city and United’sequally inexorable decline. Sensing a few more cracks in the empire, the mediavultures are pecking away again. Or, to shift metaphors midstream, Rooney,sensing the water lapping at his ankles, plans to be the first rat off thevessel.

There’s a glass half-full reading of all this of course. Inthat version of events, United are sitting a mere three points behind theleague-leaders, going into that phase of the season when they habitually kickinto gear and with machine-like precision do just what is required to close out the opposition and winthe title. Then factor-in that those current league-leaders are city, providingnot just additional local motivation for securing title number 20, but also beinga club for whom failure is the defining characteristic, the strand in their DNA that no amount of petro-dollars canever eradicate.

And factor-in Fergie of course, who relishes battles likethese, ever obstinate, ever unwilling to countenance failure, the manager forall seasons. Lose this afternoon and it will precipitate another week of crisistalk, another mass venting of spleen on phone-ins and forums, more hyperbolicand hysterical tweets. And all it will do is help foster the siege mentalitythat Fergie thrives on and that he’ll use to drive his squad on through thecoming weeks.

Win this afternoon and...well, we can’t win really can we?Not in any meaningful sense. Beat city and how far will it really go inexorcising the horror of the 1-6? Say, by some miracle that United repay themwith a thrashing of similar proportions, what does it win us? Sure, temporaryownership of that hoary old trope ‘bragging rights’ that we hear so much of onDerby Day, but defeats in the FA Cup, particularly not in the third round, don’tcarry the deadly sting of league meetings, and city fans will exit the groundsecure in that three-point advantage whatever the outcome today.

All a win would achieve is to paper the cracks until thenext crisis takes hold, staunch one gash before blood gushes from the next. Forthe glass half-empty take on matters, Rob Smyth has provided an eloquent distillation of about a decade’s worth of Red Issues this morning. It makes a prettydepressing read, but he nails the many misgivings most reds have about theGlazer’s ‘stewardship’ of the club.

Considering our opponents today, his eye-catching line aboutUnited’s net-spend over the last three years being lower than that of HullCity, Burnley and Blackpool, could be read as testimony to the tight fiscalpolicies under the Glazer regime, proof that financial fair-play and sustainedsuccess are not incompatible. That barely tells the story of course. That comesin the haemorrhaging of money by the family, the constant price-hikes, leadingto the hollowing-out of the club’s hard-core support.

Smyth refers to a masochistic urge amongst some reds forsome serious pain that will lead to an ‘industrial cleansing’, a purging of theGlazer’s from the OT body-politic, ushering in some kind of utopia. (As TravisBickle might have said, ‘One day a real crisis will come to wash all the Glazerscum off the streets.’) Nice dream, to quote Thom Yorke, but not one likely toactually happen. For all the death-knells being sounded, there’s still far toomuch quality in the United squad for this to become a reality, a fact that theself-regarding anti-Fergie voices that shout most on twitter will just have tolive with.

But though Smyth is right in most of the things he says,Rooney stabbing home a late winner would be that bit righter. And that’s thebest and worst thing about the game. What we live for are those spasms ofdelirium and delight that obliterate everything we rationally know to be true.And when they come against them, there, they’re all the sweeter.

Will we win today? I’m half and half about that.

Snide Info

2011-07-15T15:18:00.001+01:00

Screenwriter William Goldman might have scripted timeless classics such as ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ and ‘All the President’s Men’, but the words he’ll probably be remembered for more than any others come from his memoir ‘Adventures in the Screentrade’. There he wrote ‘No one knows anything.’ He might have been talking about film, but his words apply equally well to many other fields, from politics to music. And, of course, to football. Never more so than now, in the dog days of the close season, when transfer speculations rushes in to fill the void left by actual stuff happening.

Anything great in film (and many things far from great) deserve a sequel, and Goldman’s maxim definitely gets one when it comes to transfer speculation; no-one knows anything, but everyone thinks they know something. So depending which paper you read, which internet source you put your trust in, or whether the Glazer’s have done enough this summer to dispel doubts that United will never again be a major force when it comes to recruiting world-renowned talent, David Gill is right now speeding across Milan to sign up Wesley Sneijder. Alternatively Fergie and Gill, with the collusion of obliging hacks, have simply allowed such talk to flare to fan sluggish season-ticket sales.

In the light of recent revelations, journalistic reputation is already a pretty debased currency, but it’s weird to see so many willing to stake their names on such directly contradictory outcomes. Even weirder is the absolute authority and conviction with which they state their claims. I’m not talking here of the massed ranks of forumistas and tweeters eager to inflate their status as in the know merchants. I’m talking about those with picture bylines, the kind who come the new season will be angling for Sunday morning invites round Brian Woolnough’s gaffe for plastic croissants and warm orange juice (strictly ‘from concentrate’).

Who’s briefing who? And what are their motives? One day the BBC’s Howard Nurse is claiming that a ‘reliable’ OT source (reliable, like ‘informed’ being one of those adjectives that has come untethered from its actual meaning) that United were never in for Sneijder and that Gill was never even in Milan. This last point being a reference to the apex (one hopes) of silly-season idiocy when Gill began to trend on twitter as rumour of his location swept the web. The next day, the Guardian still go with a piece of where Sneijder will fit into the tactical scheme of things, while the M.E.N. , pinning the location of the meeting to Zurich, reckon the deal is still very much alive.

Who to believe? Definitely not Fergie himself who has made a career out of dissembling to the press. Whether he observes the whole sorry charade with mirth or with despair is open to debate. I’d guess a mixture of the two. But I couldn’t say for certain. Like everyone, when it comes down to it, I know nothing.

Seismic Saturday

2011-05-13T17:38:00.006+01:00

We live in the Age of the Overstatement. And you know who’s to blame. Every Super Sunday another superlative gets drained of meaning as Sky dupe us into believing that the Premier League is simply one climactic, borderline classico after another. Hardly surprising then that the claims to historical significance of any given Saturday or Sunday in the footballing calendar should be treated with liberal quantities of salt. But if any Saturday ever deserved to have something like ‘Seismic’ attached to it, it’s the one coming up, a day that for United fans potentially brings two moments of, ahem, massive significance, one of which could cancel the other one out. The big question being, which is which?

Let’s start with the first. Nineteen. Think about that. Twelve times in eighteen years. For those of us weaned during the great famine of the 80’s, with only the odd FA Cup and glorious tales of years gone by to sustain us, it’s almost beyond comprehension. Young United fans, with their reflex hatred of all things Scouse, should have tried going to school when everyone supported Liverpool, when it seemed like every season they’d scupper the hope that this year was the one. They’d know about hating Scousers then. So I’ll say it again. Nineteen. (And with that said, can reds who should know better abandon this wacky get Paul Hardcastle to Number 1 campaign. Am I alone in thinking it smacks of the sort of fans who get their kicks carrying inflatable bananas or doing Poznan’s?).

Talking of which. Barely a couple of hours after we hopefully sink our claws into a deeper groove on that there perch, history of another kind could well be written at Wembley. Many United fans are already making noises about how any rays of light emanating from Wembley will be obliterated by that giant 19 taking all the space in the sky. I’m not so sure. For one thing, United were practically crowned on Sunday, meaning many of the tribute pieces have already gone to press. For another, there’s just no getting away from the fact that, like it or not, city winning the cup is a big deal. Best to admit this to yourself now rather than make a fool of yourself arguing otherwise. Not bigger than winning a record 19^th no, but big nonetheless.

Think about it. This isn’t just getting a single monkey off your back, it is, to quote a bloke who knew a thing or two about bitterness, a wilderness of monkeys. We remember what that was like. True, for us it was the league title rather than just the trinket of an FA Cup, but it matters and there’s no escaping it. What do we do with the flag? Straight in the Irwell for me. In fact, it’s always astonished me that city never got round to negating it by just putting up an identical one of their own, would have soon lost its impact then.

Driving home tonight, mulling over some of the thoughts that I’m putting down here, I thought about some of the decent city fans I’ve know over the years. Kids I’ve taught with pretty shoddy lives – I know, I know, the gag’s write themselves, but not everyone has the courage to call their old man one of them – whose lives would be made a bit less shoddy if for once city didn’t let them down. It was a moment of weakness. I tried to fight it. But I can’t deny that for a spell there I felt what could only be described as a moment of equanimity about a city win.

It passed. I thought about those all those clowns doing ‘their’ Poznan, ‘Munich’ dribbling from their lips and getting caught in their ‘taches. But if it doesn’t happen on Saturday, it’ll happen soon. They’ll act like idiots when it happens, and if we don’t allow them their moment, so will we. Now where’s that bucket with the big hole?

So, farewell then @dgibbo28

2011-04-25T21:31:00.002+01:00

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.

Shades of Red

2011-04-21T22:26:00.002+01:00

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.

#mufc...ok?

2011-04-19T15:34:00.000+01:00

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.

Negative capability

2011-03-06T21:25:00.000+01:00

Ready to get a bit pretentious? Strap yourself in then, here we go. In 1817, while musing on exactly what gave Shakespeare his extraordinary genius as a writer, John Keats decided that the secret lay in what he described as ‘negative capability’. This he defined as, and I paraphrase only slightly, the ability to hold two seemingly contradictory ideas in mind at the same time. (Full disclosure: I just paid Wikipedia a quick visit to see if my Keats knowledge was holding up.) It’s a concept that, as United fans, we’ve had to take a crash course in this season.

For starters, there’s the fact that this is one of the most toothless and mediocre squads to have been assembled during Fergie’s time at the club, for proof of which you need only look at our dismal record of away performances. Except, this thought is counter-balanced by the fact we’re still top of the league and may well cancel out the memory of all those dire awaydays by taking the record up to 19.

It doesn’t stop there either. Alex Ferguson is a genius without comparison, a figure whose track record at United allows him license to do whatever he wants, without quibble or question, for as long as he wants to do it. Apart from the fact the same bloke is also a source of public embarrassment who heaps shame on the club with every hypocritical, myopic referee-slandering rant, and who has the effrontery to compound this by regularly snubbing every media outlet that his core support is likely to see, while happily opening up to a New York based digital radio station. And still persists in the line that the mediocrity of his squad is no way related to the Glazer’s financial chicanery.

It’s a wonder the weight of carrying these contradictory notions doesn’t do us an injury. And still they come. Nani? The notion that he is the team’s outstanding attacking force, able to bamboozle defenders at will, seems curiously difficult to take root, challenged as it is by the obduracy of the idea that he is little than a preening liability who will never be fit to lace Ronaldo’s silver boots. And he is tweets are shit too.

Wayne Rooney? Rampaging force of nature, a throwback to a sepia-age when footballers didn’t think it acceptable to spunk what to some is a week’s wages on a single packet of Marlboro. That Wayne Rooney. The one with a first-touch that has all the class of a Bolton call-girl, and who lumbers around the pitch, playing one lumpen, rotten ball after another. And who scored the finest goal of the season in the derby.

They don’t allow your thoughts to settle for a second this side. But I suppose tranquillity isn’t what you sign-up for when you support a football team, especially not this one. Let’s hope that all these contradictions level themselves out to make a thoroughly undeserved 19 come the season’s end.

Build a Rocket Boys!

2011-02-27T21:45:00.000+01:00

In case you haven’t noticed, Elbow have a new album due in the next weeks or two. Hard to miss really. There’s Guy Garvey glowering from the cover of Q. There he is again in the Observer magazine. Going off the four tracks I’ve heard so far, and judging by the early reviews, it sounds like a more than worthy follow-up to The Seldom Seen Kid, consolidating Garvey’s status as the laureate of middle-age blokedom, and knocking Mozzer of his perch as the rainy city’s reigning lyricist supreme.

And in a stunning publicity coup, Guy and co and have recruited none other than Wayne Rooney himself to ensure that Elbow were the talk of Match of the Day, Sunday Supplement, and all the back-pages as well. Some going.

In truth when I got around to seeing the incident for myself – wasn’t there, wasn’t down the pub, wasn’t chasing glitchy streams on the laptop – I was expecting something far more innocuous than what I actually saw. I’ve got the tweets of United fans blubbing about media bias to blame for this. All over my timeline it was Caldwell...blah...Gerrard...blub...FA conspiracy...blah...and very little acknowledgment of quite how dickish and indefensible Wayne’s behaviour was.

A stray elbow in the thick of a tussle is one thing, but veering deliberately in a lad’s direction to give him a none too surreptitious dig is quite another. What surprised me most about the red-tinted view, was the fact that to my mind myopia in the face of Wayne’s misdemeanours was something else that perished along with the notion that he was ‘one of us’ when Stretford decided that the club’s ambitions for the size of his client’s salary didn’t match his own.

So when the FA decide they can retrospectively punish him, don’t start bleating about Stevie G, thank the stars that it means more starts for the effervescent Hernandez, and less time spent wincing at Wayne’s gruesome first-touch.

Oh, and buy ‘Build a Rocket Boys!’.

Tweet Nothings

2011-02-21T21:34:00.000+01:00

I’m an information junkie. I trace the virus back to my teenage paper-round. Every morning I’d return home and scrub the ink from my hands, but I couldn’t do the same for the newsprint that had already leaked into my veins. Front-pages, back-pages, Telegraph, Mirror, Angling Times, Cage and Aviary Bird, I’d peruse ‘em all. This voracious thirst for facts would take many forms in my life. For years, I couldn’t turn on the telly without first visiting – in this order - ceefax pages 302, 101 and 540 (music and showbiz if memory serves, BBC2 only). With the advent of rolling news – and the passing of ceefax – I’d punch in 501 then 405, eyes roving across the screen, from news-ticker, to side-bar, all the while cocking an ear to whatever flowed from the newsreaders mouth.

Then there’s the newspapers and magazines. TS Eliot said that Prufrock could measure his life in teaspoons. I can measure mine in magazines. Roy of the Rovers. Shoot. Match Weekly. Smash Hits. Record Mirror. NME. NME, Sounds and Melody Maker. The Face. Select. Q. Uncut. When Saturday Comes. Word. And that’s only the regular ones. You can slot the occasional New Statesman, New Yorker (wanted to add New Scientist in there but honestly can’t) and Mojo in there. Not forgetting the staple Red Issue and United We Stand. Oh, and the odd Four Four Two too.

And the newspapers. A youthful dalliance with the Independent was soon extinguished when I settled down with the Guardian. Go on holiday – here or abroad – and my first concern is sourcing a copy of the paper. Have holiday’s been marred by me traipsing halfway across Devon fruitlessly searching for that morning’s Guardian? (Me: ‘But it’s the Media section. And the sport. And Charlie Brooker.’ Her: ‘Tough shit.’) Erm, no, course they haven’t.

And now there’s the internet, or more specifically twitter. I’ve never been an actual junkie, but I imagine that discovering twitter is rather like that moment when the discerning junk-fiend finds crack, the pure distillation of all your narcotic fantasies. How addicted am I? (just for the purposes of clarification: to twitter, not crack).

Well, in the time it’s taken me to write four paragraphs I’ve made six separate visits to twitter, adding to my stock of knowledge such morsels as the fact that the singer from Best Coast reckons that Rihanna in Kanye West’s ‘All of the Lights’ video is the hottest thing she’s ever seen (not disagreeing with that), and that UWS’s editor bumped into Dani Alves buying fish after Barca’s match last night. Oh, and @rioferdy5 (how long before he’s wearing that on the back of his shirt? I mean if Hernandez can get away with Chicharito it can’t be far away) is on his way to training, having last night taken one of his lucky ‘tweeps’ to see Usher with him (Nani was there as well).

You’d struggle –sorry Andy - to call any of this essential information, though at least all of those mentioned can look to decent sized followings to justify interest in their thoughts. What excuse for me and my paltry 70, a significant proportion of whom appear to be spam (I’m not convinced for example that Diana Lawson, who spends ‘her’ time aboard twitter imploring people to look at her ‘naughty pictures’ is exactly on tenterhooks awaiting my verdict on Gabriel Obertan’s ‘performance’ against Crawley or PJ Harvey’s new album).

Thing is, this doesn’t really bother me. My other addiction is using words. When I was younger and played football and the street was deserted, I could happily pass hours booting the ball off the side of the house or doing keepie-uppies (funnily enough I’d always stall at about the same place where my twitter follower count peters out). In my mind I was lashing last-minute winner after last-minute winner. In reality I was driving everyone inside mad with that endless thud-thud-thud on the side of the house. These days, in my mind every tweet is a perfectly chiselled bon-mot shaking the foundations of music criticism/football culture. The reality is another pebble pitched into the digital canyon; no splash, no echo, just silence.

And every now and again, 140 characters won’t do. And I post here. A bigger pebble, but precisely the same effect.

On the Wayne?

2011-01-17T21:56:00.000+01:00

We’ve all been there. Your bladder’s screaming at you for relief, but there’s a good 20 minutes to half-time and United are pressing. Ignore it. 5 minutes later, the ball’s out of play and you’re doing that sideways shuffle down the aisle, muttered apologies strewn in your wake. Leg it down the steps. Unzip. Sweet Jesus that’s good. And then, in your blissful trance you become aware of a dip or hush in the noise from outside. What’s happening? You find out soon enough as the terrible muffled roar erupts and the realisation that you’ve missed a goal hits home.

Such is the familiarity of this scenario that it drags another familiar one with it, the notion that, if United are finding a goal hard to come by, then you can help the cause by going for what we might call a propitiatory piss, daring the fates to conjure a goal in your absence. You’ll miss it, but the greater good will have been served.

Well this blog-post is kind of in that vein, I’m willing to take a hit for the greater good. Obviously this won’t involve micturation, instead it will involve me making foolhardy pronouncements about a player’s value that I hope will come back to bite me the next time he runs out in a red shirt. I’ll slag him off, and he’ll prove just what a know-nothing I really am. Simple.

Twelve months ago, what I’m about to write would have seemed unthinkable. One, because the player himself was having a season so electrifying many people had us down as a one man team, and second, because, for many of us, he had come to embody what we believed United stood for, he was us out there doing what we could never do. And now? Well, the picture’s slightly different.

Let’s tackle the form first. In a season blighted by injury he has netted just twice, once from the penalty spot and once – and a pretty speculative effort it was too – from open play. The goals tally is one thing, the rotten first touch and equally stinking distribution are quite another. Effort and endeavour aren’t lacking – he is, in that old cliché beloved of pundits, ‘probably trying too hard’, trite and banal, but accurate in the way it flags up the way what was once effortless and instinctive has deserted him.

All players have bad spells of course, and Wayne – oh, yes, if you haven’t realised that’s who I’m on about – is only human, it’s what Rooney pulled earlier in the season that means he’s going to get called out on it now in ways that he wouldn’t in seasons gone by. We’re all grown-ups of course. We knew that he was Everton at heart, and that if he was willing to abandon the club of his youth in pursuit of wealth and glory, then he’d do the same to us if similar opportunities came knocking on Paul Stretford’s door. We know all this, but we were still floored by his actions, hurt in ways that we could only be someone we had loved unconditionally, forgetting that on his side, there were conditions aplenty.

Against Spurs yesterday it almost hurt to see him toil so forlornly, to see him such a shadow of the force that rampaged through last season and that, in the last 15 minutes of the Carling Cup semi at Eastlands gave a performance that I’d put up there with Keano in Turin. But knowing the brinksmanship pulled on his behalf, knowing how bloated his wage packet he is, and how much he’s willing to pay for a packet of fags, sympathy dries up, and you’re left wondering if he can ever be the same player he was again.

And so, with that said, a simple message remains: prove me wrong Wayne. Please.

Same old city?

2011-01-16T11:33:00.002+01:00

I’ll be honest – I’m getting nervous. I’m writing this at about ten in the morning, and, for at least the next 8 hours, the summit of the Premier League table is occupied by Manchester City. Should we fail to get a point at Spurs this afternoon, their tenancy will be extended for at least another week. Delirium will be writ large throughout Stockport and surrounding areas, plans will already be being made to travel to all next season’s Champion’s League games by bogey, and Gary Cook will be buying up space on every billboard and bus-stop in the North-West to do his crowing.

Such premature self-congratulation is of course, one of the many traits that make the Manchester City Project such a comedic gift. Should Spurs not be their usual obliging selves as whenever the reds roll into town, there will be consolation and comfort taken in the fact that we still have two games in hands on the laser-blues. In some ways, this is a whole loaf of comfort, rather than a few scattered crumbs, but it’s this that sets the anxiety rippling through the stomach.

I’ve already got a last-season-at-Burnley feeling about next week’s trip to Blackpool, particularly given our habit of chucking away winning positions away from home. Another draw looms. The gap is shaved a bit closer. Then there’s the Chelsea game, shifted to a point when they may finally have remembered how to win matches, or at least not lose them. Another draw. Then where are we?

I’m discounting Arsenal from the title-run in, too flimsy at the back, and – clichéd it might be, but it’s hard to dispute – too easily outmuscled by sides unwilling to sit back and applaud their undeniable artistry. As for Chelsea, too many cheap points lost in the last couple of months. Which leaves two; us and them. Them first.

You keep telling yourself; they’re city, they’ll find a way to blow it. They could be five-nil up at half-time, nailed on certs, and they’d still engineer a way to lose 6-5 (Mancini urging them on from the touchline, telling them 5-6 will do maybe). But then you look at some of the personnel involved: Tevez, Yaya Toure, Silva, Mancini himself, and you start to feel a bit edgy. We’re not in the Kippax anymore, Dorothy.

As for us, we’re unbeaten, but at times, like Villa and Birmingham away for instance, we look utterly mediocre. That’s not to deny that we haven’t also played some thoroughly wonderful stuff, and it’s important to note players like Vidic, Berbatov and the rejuvenated Anderson, all of whom are probably having their most consistent seasons in United shirts. Other positives? Hernandez has done great work, we’ve proved that we can play devastating football without Scholes as the fulcrum, Carrick is creeping back towards his best, Rafael has made the right-back position his own. And we’ve achieved all of this with Rooney largely on the periphery. And we’re unbeaten.

All of which serves to quell the storm of nerves for a minute or two, but then you glance at the table again, the what if’s surge back, and you wonder if it would be sporting to have some kind of formal ceremony in which we hand the banner over.

A win today should diminish the chances of that having to happen.

Boo-Ya Tribe

2010-08-11T10:59:00.000+01:00

This just in: England, it transpires, didn’t win the World Cup. This, contrary to the fact that the team is stuffed with players who regularly reach the level of mediocre in what giant footballing minds as diverse as Sam Allardyce and Phil Gartside routinely refer to as ‘The Best League in the World’. Tonight, we welcome our conquered heroes back onto the divot strewn sward that is Wembley, and the national media has decided that the only possible response to events in South Africa is a period of sustained and cathartic howling. It seems getting North Korean on their pampered asses is the only option.

Unable to be there and boo in person? Don’t fret. Sky, or whoever happens to be televising events, have rigged up a device that means everytime you press your red button a tiny boo will emit from the Wembley speaker system. Should enough of us press them at once it will produce a sound that will make the din of all those vuvezelas seem like a tinny whisper. Indeed it promises to be so deafening that the players on the pitch are likely to be reduced to shit-brained whimpering husks, crawling on the floor, pleading for mercy, until midday on Saturday when the Prem kicks-off and we can go back to treating them like demi-gods again.

What purpose will this orgy of flagellation and booing actually serve? Will the fans feel cleansed to have purged it from their system? Unlikely. Will it in any way help the team? We’ve already seen what Wayne Rooney thinks of fans who turn on their own team. Is he likely to hold up his hand and say ‘fair-do’s’ to this media-orchestrated frenzy? I doubt it. I’m not certain anything penetrates the egos of certain England players, so swaddled are they in luxury and wealth. But this barracking is only guaranteed to make the team more inhibited about wearing the England shirt, not less.

Will supporters of all the clubs who didn’t win the title last season boo their teams onto the pitch this weekend? Of course not. You can only despair at the media-led circus around the national team and the idiots who will fall into line and do their howling for them. Wouldn’t it be great if they didn’t do the media’s bidding tonight and cheered the team on like returning heroes? And the chances of that happening? About the same as England winning the next World Cup.

Back on the horse

2010-08-08T10:33:00.004+01:00

A year ago, along with many reds, in the full grip of my scouse-phobia, I was heartily excoriating our glossily-brochured new signing Michael Owen, and my feelings about Owen contaminated my thinking about the season to come. It wasn't that Owen was scouse-to-the-core that bothered me (or wasn't just that) it was the fact that his signature confirmed the penury of our ambitions under the Glazer regime. So this was our level now was it? Useful to get that learned as Philip Larkin once wrote about something entirely different.

A year on, and with only marginally improved levels of investment into a team that has another year of wear and tear on the clock – and a pivotal midfielder still no nearer to recovery – you'd think that the gloom would be overwhelming. Football being nothing if not irrational, it isn't. In fact quite the reverse, I find myself convinced that, in spite of much of the evidence before my eyes, that we'll win the league. And then I pause for a minute and think, Christ, have I just realised what it's like to support city? Then I run my tongue across my upper-lip and look down at my trousers. The upper-lip is tacheless and the jeans are neither Royton-market circa 86 stone-washed or dubiously stained. Phew, some relief at least.

But back to the season ahead. And the one just gone. Of the Owen signing, I have to admit that he's grown on me. Of course, scoring the winning goal in a derby in the 96^th minute will do that for any player, but his general demeanour has been quietly impressive as well. No Big-I-Am-ism (not in the multiple-marriages sense) and no self-promotion, just quietly going about his game. He might lack the explosive pace of old (Number 1 on Owen-cliché Bingo), but he makes up for it with incisive and intelligent runs behind the defence (Number 2). And it can't harm the likes of Macheda and Wellbeck who have many gifts, but great footballing brains aren't obviously among them. I actually felt for him when he was forced off at Wembley, not an emotion I expected to feel this time twelve months ago.

As for the scouse-phobia a counselling programme has encouraged me to realise that I am simply projecting a lot of inner-rage on to the vermin, I mean men from Anfield, and has also encouraged that I take a historical perspective, recognising that without any trade and traffic between the two clubs our history would be radically different. It's definitely working and I have hardly any malice towards the scouse-c^&$% for rolling over against Chelsea when we most needed a favour last season.

And what of the investment made this term? Smalling is a rookie and a gamble. I don't see him displacing Jonny Evans let alone Rio (if he's fit enough or puts down his phone and stops Tweeting for long enough). One for the future, or a makeweight in some player plus cash deal two years from now? We'll see.

As for Javier Hernandez (or el Chichorito as official ordinance is requiring us to refer to him), expectations are slightly different. When the Glazer accounts were laid bare at the start of the year and it became clear just how much was a) being pillaged from the club by the scions of Malcolm themselves and b) disappearing into the chasm of debt and interest repayments, my continued sponsoring of the regime became too big a problem to ignore. Wearing Green and Gold was a start but it wasn't enough; I couldn't renew in clean conscience.

So come a week on Monday, I won't be taking up my seat in the North Stand. I won't be looking left in the hope that the girl with a passing resemblance to Alexa Chung is there. I won't be looking right in the hope that the girl who talks at deafening volume exclusively in football clichés ('Knock it! Knock it!') isn't. And when the final whistle goes I won't be floating from the ground in a state of pure rapture prompted by Chichorito's home debut, as I did after Ronnie shimmered into view against Bolton in 2003. Instead I'll be sat at home, thinking ruefully about the £49 that hasn't just disappeared into the black hole, but that has cost me something more intangible and precious in the process. But more of that another day.

Elsewhere in the squad I suppose we should regard it as a blessing that Vidic has temporarily divorced himself from the adjective 'wantaway', though it might be better if he simply divorced himself from the Mrs instead. And if you read that 'suppose' in the last sentence and detected a hint of equivocation you'd be correct. For me, Vidic is still a shadow of the player who strode onto the Old Trafford turf to face Liverpool two seasons ago. Ridiculous and overblown it might well be to suggest that one game and one player can reduce a reputation to rubble, but it's a feeling that I can't shift, particularly as we see more and more ugly, desperate challenges from him, and fewer clean ones.

This being a post-World Cup season it is of course traditional that a recently (three) lionized individual should be skulking back to Old Trafford in shame lugging the fury and shattered hopes of the nation in his wake. Previous incumbents like Beckham and Ronaldo are this year joined by both Wayne Rooney and Patrice Evra who in their own ways will be on the receiving end of sizeable backlashes. Good. Let it inspire them to further glory in a red shirt and may the small-time nomarks who boo have their fury rammed back down their throats.

I'm going on a bit, so let's wrap it up with a few questions, some of which will be answered this season. Will Giggs and Scholes continue to be able to drink freely from the elixir of youth (and will they let Gary Neville have more than just a couple of drops)? Will Carrick rediscover his sureness of touch and make me look less of a fool for repeatedly insisting that where Fabio went wrong wasn't in not playing Joe Cole, but in not playing Michael Carrick? Will any of Berbatov's legion of critics notice that he does actually run quite a bit? Will the Red Knights fall on their swords – and if they did would they prove to be any more potent than last season's takeover rhetoric?

Oh, and what do you think of this?

The Cruellest Month?

2010-04-01T14:41:00.004+01:00

It doesn't do to let yourself get riled by things that are said in the media, particularly when they're said about every hack's favorite team, Arsenal. But sometimes you just can't help it. Take the fact that Richard Williams - great writer, but prone to some of the most ludicrous views, witness his infatuation with Mourinho throughout his time at Chelsea - who this morning likens Fabregas's performance last night to Keano's in Turin '99. This was merely the cherry on top of a two day media love-in for Wenger's supposed aesthetic approach to the game.

The superlatives bandied about over this period have got more and ridiculous. The guff won't stop gushing out of every orifice - how Arsenal play the game as it was meant to be played, how beautiful the geometry of their passing is, how more superior and artful is the version of the game practised by the aesthetes of the Emirates to the crude form of the Old Trafford artisans.

Call me bitter, but have the media not noticed this bloke called Paul Scholes who's been operating in the centre of our midfield for over a decade now, playing passes of such an artistic nature that each deserves to come with their own Factory catalogue number? Or his mate, Ryan Giggs who glides around the pitch and plays balls of equally supernatural majesty?

Did anyone notice that, for the second consecutive season, we went to the Emirates and utterly annihalated them, not through bullying but through the verve and artistry of our play? Obviously not. And much as it might be helpful to our own cause if they were to concoct a victory in the Nou Camp, I really hope that Barca demolish them next week.

Anyway rant over. Back to awaiting Berba's apotheosis on Saturday morning and wondering if any statements about Rooney's health emerging from the Carrington Ministry of Misinformation can be trusted.

One man team?

2010-03-15T15:55:00.005+01:00

One man team? Not on this evidence. Understandably, Wayne has been hogging the plaudits, but it's not like every goal has been some solo effort conjured from nowhere. Valencia and Nani have provided impeccable crosses, Carrick, Fletcher and Park have been exemplary in the middle, and yesterday, it was all about one man; everyone's favourite languid Bulgarian.

Where is the jury currently positioned on the Berba question? Yesterday was an exquisite refutation of every lazy line trotted out by the Berba sceptics. Doesn't work hard enough? So who was that closing down and pressing the Fulham midfield? Can't play with Rooney? Watch that second goal again. And the first come to that. Doesn't finish? Goal number three.

As one firmly in the pro-Dimitar wing of red/green & gold support, even I have to accept that for all the sublime touches and moments like the Reebok last season, Berbatov hasn't done enough to completely destroy the sceptics case. But if yesterday is anything to go by, it won't be long before he does.

Green and goldenballs

2010-03-11T13:16:00.003+01:00

Apolgies to the Mirror for stealing their headline. And apologies to anyone who occasionally stops by on the off chance that I might have got round to actually updating this thing. Naturally, United being United, the red universe looks very different from how it did when I last posted in December. For one thing, it's not red anymore, it'd green and gold (or as I was told by a colleague this morning, 'Don't romanticise! It's yellow!').

This comment came from someone who knows so little about football that a few weeks ago I had to explain which team Eric Cantona played for to contextualise 'Looking for Eric' for her. Now, the post-bond issue furore is being discussed on Radio 4, in no small part thanks to the picture above.

Naturally Becks distanced himself from any insurrectionary motives, but the lad is such a canny manipulator of the media that he can't not have known that image would adorn the front pages today. Even if he was just shrewdly swiping the headlines from under Wayne's nose, it can't not help prove something of a catalyst in the bid to erase the Glazer's from the history of our club.

Dreary me

2009-11-01T16:03:00.003+01:00

Some thoughts…

1) Where were the Blackburn fans? At home dosed up on Tamiflu? And why didn’t they sing, ‘If you’ve all got swine-flu wash your hands?

.
2) This postal strike’s getting out of hand. I mean Jamie Carragher’s red-card for that challenge on Owen turned up six days late yesterday.

.
3) Talking of Owen, and unfunny jokes. That miss at the death yesterday. Dearie, dearie me.

.
4) Also from the that joke’s not funny anymore department…Nani’s farcical display. Someone, anyone put an end to it now.

.
5) Time prevents me from anymore. My name’s Royton Red. I’m here all week.

Or maybe we shall...

2009-10-25T20:45:00.001+01:00

So here I am, about four hours after another utterly supine/soporific/anodyne performance against this week’s Official Club in Crisis – our next turn is scheduled for early December - and yet I find myself surprisingly sanguine about things. Perhaps it’s the bucolic splendour of the new Kings of Convenience album that Spotify is kindly piping to my ears; perhaps it’s the fact that last night’s booze intake hasn’t entirely vacated my bloodstream; perhaps it’s the knowledge that they routed us 4-1 last season and we still won the league.
.
Perhaps the source of my unusual calm and equanimity is that, much as the players couldn’t be arsed working themselves up to any pitch of interest, neither can I. Or maybe it’s that performances like that today are everything that I expected of this season and it’s vindicating to be proved right. Not that such vindication beings any real pleasure or satisfaction. That transcendent moment in the derby aside, Owen once again looks horribly and embarrassingly past his sell-by date. He would have done more to press his England claims by staying at the Toon and scoring a hatful down in the Championship. He won’t manage it at United.
.
Valencia and Nani proved equally ineffectual, while Vidic and Rio seem to be in some kind of death spiral in which both are competing to see whose talent can evaporate the quickest. At least Rooney and Berba continue to excel; the margins just didn’t run for them today though.
.
Just like in Rome, the two players whose reputations were most enhanced by today were Fletcher and Hargreaves. In fact, from the moment I saw that Fletch hadn’t even made the bench, the optimism that had coursed while reading all the last rites for Rafa in the paper suddenly started to ebb away. Thing is while we were top of the league our shortcomings were being masked by the shortcomings of everyone else in the league. And as city and Arsenal both draw eminently winnable fixtures, that’s a situation that might remain for some time.
.
Still, winning a 19th by default would still be sweet. But when we’re this mediocre, that’s not really going to happen, is it?

We shall not...

2009-09-27T15:38:00.001+01:00

Last season it took us until January 19th and that glorious dipping header from Berba at the Reebok before we climbed to the top of the table. This time out, even though my United calendar is still turning to face the wall – September belonging to Tevez – we’ve mounted the thing before October. What happened to all that pre-season doom and gloom? I for one was convinced pre-season that the city project would finish above us and that our hold on a top-four spot was looking far from secure. Was I off my head?
.
Maybe, maybe not. Leading the league in September offers no guarantee you’ll still be there come the season’s end, as Rafa well knows. But it has to be said, the ghost of Turf Moor has been fully exorcised, particularly now that Chelsea’s claim to invincibility have been shredded by Wigan. In truth confidence has ebbed back ever since the Spurs game when the trauma of Rome finally seemed to be forgotten and we remembered just what a gifted bunch of players we have at United.
.
That said, yesterday once again illustrated the depth of our reliance on Ryan Giggs. Berba’s goal celebration – stabbing his finger in Ryan’s direction – was, quite literally – a pointed attack on the dearth of quality service that had predominated while Nani was on the field. Indeed, you have to wonder if Nani is ever going to shed the errors that infect his game and make good on his potential.
.
I’m assuming that Alex, for all the talk of his adopting a more sophisticated approach to man-management these days – has felt compelled to give Nani several blasts of the fabled hair-dryer, and yet put the guy on the edge of the box with players screaming for a pass and he will invariably look to take a shot that was never on in the first place. Booing of your own is never an option, but the grinding of teeth all around the United end as Nani squanders another chance and Rooney and Berba look at him in dismay, disgust and despair tells its own story. Time is running out for you, son.

Turn the telly up!

2009-09-21T19:55:00.003+01:00

We all make mistakes. Red Issue for instance previewed yesterday’s game with the warning that a cracker was unlikely to be on the cards. Meanwhile on Sky’s Sunday Supplement the Mirror’s Martin Lipton was asserting, with that unswerving conviction that journalists are prone to, that Tevez would play no part in the afternoon’s game. And I myself, may have suggested that signing Michael Owen was no Fergie masterstroke, but a desperate throw of the dice from a manager stripped of financial resources. Well, it gives me infinite pleasure to state that I was wrong. Well, mostly wrong.
.
If Michael Owen does nothing else in a United shirt he did that yesterday. When the stakes were at their very highest, when pressure at its most intense, he got one chance and he slotted it away with imperious ease. City fans will crowd the airwaves with moans about Fergie-time (I’d not even made it to the top of Sir Matt Busby Way before hearing some bitter invoking that phrase), but any rational ones amongst their number have to admit that, in the second half, they were destroyed yesterday. Wave after wave of attacks, mostly kept out by the ever-excellent Shay Given, galvanized Old Trafford to a pitch that’s been sorely lacking in recent years.
.
When Rio ridiculously opted to chip Bellamy and left the golf-club wielding weasel free to rush goalwards the sense of deflation was unbearable. Cut to twenty minutes later, or whatever it was city fans claim, and the euphoria was palpable. Affecting coolness and maintaining the aggressively anti-Owen posture that I’ve affected all season simply wasn’t an option. Only utter barminess can suffice in such circumstances.
.
And what of that man from Argentina? Before the game all you could hear was reds lustily bellowing the hastily rewritten ode to the ‘money grabbing whore’. The boos that rang out when they announced the teams seemed to give him a physical slap. The contrast the to the love that chased him down the tunnel last time he walked on the OT turf could hardly have been more pronounced.
.
As for his performance. He scurried and chased in familiar fashion, and his closing down lead directly to the first equalizer. But, as ever – and this isn’t the revisionism of the jilted lover talking, it’s what I’ve maintained from the off – in front of goal he lacks the clinical composure that someone else deployed to such devastating effect.
.
To his credit though, when the city players converged on Bellamy to celebrate his second goal, it was noticeable that Tevez ambled back to the centre circle, alone with his thoughts. I’d have offered him a penny for them, but I know that his owners wouldn’t countenance anything like such a shoddy deal.

He's our midfield magician...

2009-09-13T10:20:00.001+01:00

About time too! When Anderson’s missile struck the back of net I jumped so high from the sofa I was in danger of hitting the roof. (Which means no, I wasn’t there. As previously discussed, if you think that renders the following worthless, go and ask Ed O’ Brian from Radiohead what he thought of the game or something). I suppose we should never be surprised by beating Spurs, it’s a routine element of every season. No matter how many goals start we give them, however unlikely and unpropitious the circumstances, we always reel them back and overpower them.
.
Such it was again yesterday. There you go, have an early lead. Need more assistance? Allow the referee to reduce us to 10 men. Surely now you’ll give us a game? Once again, the answer being a resounding no. That said, out stuttering form so far this season has left me feeling worried about any fixture, so perhaps meeting Spurs was the ideal medicine for soothing the queasiness that rises up in me whenever I think about our chances of winning anything.
.
And it was, by some distance, a magnificent performance. The Spurs midfield did its bit by playing like a bunch of immobile mannequins that we could just wander around at leisure and remind ourselves of the fantastic football we’re capable of. Anderson may well have been the chief beneficiary. Post-Rome, too many bad noises have swirled around his name, and considering that his was the limpest performance on that very limp night, the prospect of his exit looked realistic.
.
Hopefully yesterday will fire his self-belief and we can see the return of the marauding magician of a few months ago. That said, it was another midfield alchemist who really caught the eye yesterday; a sprightly fella’ by the name of Giggs; stocks of superlatives are once again running dangerously low in the face of such a performance.
.
Maybe there’s something to this weak squad, underdogs vibe – rarely does so routine a win feel as special as it did yesterday. Bring on city!

Paging Michal Mansfield QC

2009-08-31T15:13:00.003+01:00

Worryingly ordinary was the phrase I used in an e-mail, and I’ll stick by it again. Only in so far as it describes United’s current form though, this game itself was anything but ordinary. According to Mr Wenger, United were guilty of playing ‘anti-football’, in other words, unlike their other opponents so far this season, we had the temerity to close them down with vigour and pace rather than stand back and admire the beautiful geometry of their passing. How very unsporting.
.
Yes, Darren Fletcher may have been a tad over-exuberant as he clattered into Arshavin, but few objective spectators, can disagree with the fact that Fletcher was once again outstanding and, alongside Rooney, Vidic and Evra, has become one of the few guaranteed starters in the squad.
.
Similarly, few objective spectators would find it hard to disagree that United were mightily fortunate to emerge from this game with all three points. At times, one would have felt more than generous. It’s a definite worry. Last time we met Arsenal, we did to them what Barcelona did to us in Rome – utterly annihilated them. Now look at us. A pair of patchy wingers on the flanks, Carrick’s confidence having one of its periodic wobbles, and Giggsy being called on to supply all guile and invention. And the £80 million still sits in the bank. Yeah, right.
.
In recent months, the press have reported a thaw in the Fergie/Wenger enmity, but clearly substantial numbers of reds in the ground haven’t studied the memo regarding this. So, inevitably, the embarrassing paedo ditties did the rounds, tarnishing the pleasure we could all take in Wenger mounting the platform above the dug-out.
.
It was another dismal day for the United fans. Not content with goading Wenger with school-boy stuff, primed by the media, far too many obligingly booed Eduardo. Why? Have we decided we’re twinned with Celtic again? As United fans do we abhor anything that taints the purity of the beautiful game (apart from calling managers paedophiles of course)? Or, has the buffoon count taken another leap as the hard-core fall away on the back of another price-rise?
.
Still, shouldn’t moan. We won, Arsene gave us the weeks second funniest footballing moment – the first being the tubby idiot gambolling across Upton Park giving Millwall players wanker signs – and they played Ian Brown’s new single at half-time again. City’s winning streak – and the aesthetic splendour of their away shirt - can’t spoil any of that.

Crisis? What crisis? Part 129

2009-08-25T12:04:00.004+01:00

The problem with doing something like a blog is that by preserving your thoughts you are constantly being reminded of how idiotic many, let's face it most, of your opinions actually are. I'm always mentally urgiing caution, counselling against venting spleen in the immediate aftermath of a defeat. Then i log on, split open the spleen and let the vitriol pour out.

I could cover my tracks of course; some judicious use of the 'edit-post' facility could, for example, make my intemperate words from last week questioning Wayne Rooney's reputation, evaporate in an instant. But this seems like an act of bad faith; better to let the words stand - constantly stoking the flames of embarrasment in my face, as a reminder for the next time i think of writing something so patently ridiculous.

So the ghost of Turf Moor is exorcised for now and suddenly all is rosy in the red garden again, right? Not quite. Valencia may finally have put in a pin-point cross, but this particular one-man jury is still deliberating about his overall quality. The whole result has to be seen in context - flimsy opponents with a softer-centre than a Cadbury's Eclair.

Good to see Darren Fletcher getting props in the press though. And some mention must be made of the fact that Owen finished with no little aplomb. Shame he felt the need to blank the press-pack and moan about them caning him. Maybe he'll have his people knock out a glossy pamphlet pointing out that he ain't finished yet.

Oh dear

2009-08-20T13:40:00.004+01:00

Some thoughts and questions occasioned by last night’s particularly dismal showing at Turf Moor:
.
1) Can we have the Anderson who got on the plane to Rome back please?
.
2) Why does Rooney insist on undermining his reputation as a wonderful footballer by committing such ugly tackles when things aren’t going his way?
.
3) Why is Rooney never linked with mega-money deals to Milan and Madrid? Is it because, whisper it, they’ve noticed that he’s not half the player he’s cracked up to be?
.
4) For years people have been asking what will happen to United when Fergie finally retires. What if we’ve all been asking the wrong question? What if what we really should have been asking is, ‘What will happen to United when Ryan Giggs retires?’? Right now, he appears to be the only thing separating us from all-consuming mediocrity.
.
5) Is Owen really as bad as he looks?
.
6) We always start badly don’t we? Right? Right?

Starting point

2009-08-17T14:49:00.002+01:00

There was a point towards the end of last season – before the Liverpool/Fulham wobble obviously - as United breezed past opponents and a bench stuffed full of precocious talent chomped eagerly at the bit waiting to join in, that I didn’t just think last season’s title was in the bag, but this season’s as well. And probably the one after. In fact I could see a glittering line of trophies all the way from Old Trafford to the crack of doom. So why now does it seem to peter out before it’s even made it to the temple of doom? Is the gaping void left by Ronaldo really that huge?
.
One of the stock cliché’s of pre-season has been that United have replaced big-names before. Players come, players go; that’s football. We were here before Ronnie and we didn’t seem to have much bother winning baubles then; it’ll be no different after he’s gone. All fair points of course. But there is one difference. Never before have we sold the current World Player of the Year. Aside from all the petulance and the pouting, he was simply a sensational footballer. Just think back to Highbury last season and the aura of brilliance that surrounded United that night.
.
And of course you could argue that he was just as complicit in Rome on the night that aura was thoroughly demolished by Barcelona. But his positives are far in excess of his negatives. Which isn’t to say selling him wasn’t the correct thing to do; it was clearly right for all concerned. So we move on without him, but it’s where we’re moving to that troubles me.
.
As obvious as Ronnie’s talent, is the fact that anyone is going to suffer by comparison. Ferguson could have stumped up the exorbitant amount that Bayern want for Ribery – or he could if the Glazer’s hadn’t trousered the Ronnie windfall - but you can guarantee that his first duff cross would herald an outbreak of mutterings about him not being up to Ronaldo’s standard. Much in the way the first dropped point under Fergie’s eventual successor will lead to an intensification of the question of whether he’s the right man for the job. But that’s another post for another day.
.
What worried me yesterday, apart from the sudden plague that’s wiped out the defence – and let’s face up to the fact we won’t see much of Rio this season and when we do he’ll have an eye on South Africa and the brand-building potential it entails – was just how blindingly ordinary we looked. Valencia might have the power and the pace, but poise looked in short supply. How many times did he get into or near the box and not have a clue what to do with the ball? But he’ll get better. Hopefully.
.
Positives? Fletcher was outstanding; busy as ever, breaking up play, bombing forward when necessary, shame he didn’t crown the move of the match with a goal. Rooney was as ace as ever, and Ryan simply defies the ageing process and gets more freakishly brilliant every season. And Foster, after the wobbles at Wembley, went some way to redeeming himself and proving that Ferguson isn’t winding everyone up about him being the best English keeper at present.
.
And that is that.

Land ahoy

2009-07-28T14:30:00.002+01:00

First there was denial (my instinctive response to the neighbour who first told me the radio was claiming United were in for Owen being a curt, ‘Fuck off!’). Then came anger (fuel for the rant below), closely followed by bargaining, (‘he’s so injury-riddled we’ll never see him play anyway. I can withdraw that threat to return the season-ticket’). Depression was next, a fug of dismay shrouding me as it became clear that many reds were actually willing to have faith in Fergie’s ultimate act of folly, not to mention perfidy. And at last, like the grief counsellors say, I have finally washed up on the serene shores of acceptance. I can even say, ‘Michael Owen is a red’ without the involuntary shudder and everything.
.
And don’t think that I have been carried to this place of calm by the pre-season goal spree that Owen’s on either. It’s taken a great deal of sober reflection – and just as much drunken ranting – for me to arrive here, though it’s been helped by Fergie’s masterly interview in the Observer at the weekend. Though his refusal to revisit Rome and the capitulation against Barcelona is a tad worrying, the gusts of scorn blown in the direction of city were a joy. Could I ever really doubt him for long?
.
Then there’s the realisation that if Owen was the mercenary little shit that I always had him pegged for, he could probably have helped himself to far bigger wages at somewhere like Hull or Stoke than he will at United. If the details of his deal made public are true – and let’s face it, they have the whiff of a PR smokescreen concocted to appease cynics just like me – Owen has put wanting to restore his reputation as a footballer at the head of the priorities in bringing him to OT.
.
How very different to the priorities of a recently lionised former-red currently to be seen on a huge billboard opposite Harvey Nichols in the centre of town. Seems we were wrong about him then. Like the club he’s sold his soul to, he had no class after all. So, sorry Michael. Now score some goals you scouse c&*t. (It might take time for all the issues to be worked through completely).

Say it ain't so...

2009-07-05T09:28:00.005+01:00

Some thoughts occasioned by the 'transfer coup of the summer'/'nadir of Fergie's transfer market incompetence' as Michael fuckin' Owen signs on for United:

1) No. No. No. No. No. And so on. Forever.

2) Is it too late to get my season ticket money back?

3) Isn't one Owen in permanent residence at the treatment room enough for any team?

4) Whilst deploring every single one of the bovine, moronic goons who booed Berbatov last season...i will see it as a solemn duty of every red to boo Owen's every touch in a red shirt until the message sinks home that this little tosser has no right to inveigle his way into the rich tapestry of our club's history.

5) £80 million banked for Ronaldo and get in a clapped out, injury-plagued, scouse-to-the-core, mercenary 29 year old on a free to replace him. And can you still say that the Glazer's finances don't have a bearing on transfer policy?

6) No. No. No. No. No.

7) Are our principles and values so amorphous and malleable that their is no indignity or disgrace that we can't square them with? Surely every goal (should their be any; his recent track-record doesn't suggest that an avalanche is imminent) or contribution is tainted and can no longer have any meaning or value. Isn't it?

8) In Fergie we trust. See 7).

9) Am I being ridiculous? Shouldn't we be able to transcend this childish tribalism that mars the game of football? Shouldn't we accept that ultimately even the Scholes's and Rooney's of this world are in it for the money? Or if we accept this, might we as well pack the whole thing in? What's football without that tribalism and that romantic belief that somethings transcend the financial incentive?

10) No. No. No. No. No.

Spitting the dummy

2009-06-20T20:20:00.001+01:00

There are some names that strike direct to the heart of everything that is wrong with modern football. Names that instantly conjure all the festering greed and cynicism that forces the decent majority to put pegs on their noses before entering a stadium. Names that corrode the face of football, hollow out its heart, and auction its soul. Parasites bleeding money out of the game and putting absolutely nothing back in. And the worst of the lot is Kia Joorabchian.
.
I don’t know the full, tangled details as to how he came to be in a position to pimp Carlos Tevez around the football clubs of Europe, but the upshot, as announced today, is that a thoroughly decent man leaves our football club and pins his hopes on that ship of fools across town. I’d like to think that we get the measure of a man from the way he plays football. If so, Carlos, is a man of honesty and integrity, without side or malicious intent. I fail to believe that such a man would ever consider it to be in his best interests to don the lazer-blue.
.
Am I therefore mistaken or naïve in imagining him so above the sordid world of money? Perhaps. Maybe United have wounded his sense of pride by refusing to stump up an agreed asking price. Maybe the chafing of being tethered to the bench was too much to bear. Rotation’s all very well, but when you’re rotated out of the very biggest games, it might start to grate.
.
Ultimately I think Carlos himself is the biggest loser in all this. Kia Joorabchian will bank his fat fee and Carlos himself will see his wage swell, but let’s face it, the asking price, for a player with such a one-dimensional game was, exorbitant. On the back of Ronnie’s exit, United fans of a certain ilk –mainly the ones who never visit OT never mind follow the team away from home - will be calling for all kinds of vengeance to rain down on Fergie and Gill if suitably hyped replacements aren’t bought. The more level-headed will rue the loss of his tireless running, not to mention that we’re currently without a reason to goad the three-lions brigade with Argentina chants. But there’s only one winner in this mess, and it isn’t that man we all adore.

Iceberg ahead?

2009-04-13T20:24:00.002+01:00

Over the last twelve months United's style and success on the pitch has served to provide a shimmering smokescreen concealing the ever more parlous state of the club's business affairs. Well, the smoke drifted last week and through the murk it was possible to see the catastrophic mess that the Glazer coup has left behind. The United money making machine was going full tilt last year with revenue flying in from all directions - the TV bonanza, European glory, increased ticket prices having no noticeable imact on demand - yet still the debt contines to swell with no signs of abating. As has been widely noted, if they can't trim any of the debt in a good year, what on earth will happen in a lean one?

Indeed anyone hoping that the prevailing economic climate would deter the club from hiking prices again this summer might want to rethink. Our loyalty hasn't snapped yet, so clearly they can yank the rope a little bit more, no doubt goes the reasoning from the boardroom. Naturally this bothers me somewhat. The knowledge that I'm little more than a customer whose blind loyatly can be relied upon to service a debt that should never have been allowed to arise in the first place should make me throbe with rage. But, note the should.

The threat of a price increase does scare me - there is a point when I will have to say enough is enough and walk away - but the rest of this financial talk is starting to leave my more numb than angry. Why? Perhaps it's credit-cruch fatigue. When every day delivers more talk of trillion pound injections to the economy you start to become a little inured to financial panic. Such figures spiral away from reality and into the realm of abstraction.

Then there's the PLC issue. Say that all this profit wasn't getting swallowed in the crater of debt, where would it go? Would season ticket prices suddenly tumble? Not likely when they're the source of the profit in the first place. Would Messi suddenly be wearing red? Again, not likely, and do we really want to be trading in a galacticos anyway? The profits would seep straight out of the door into the pockets of the investment funds that hold the shares. The idea that pre-Glazer United was a socialist Utopia is a spot of revisionism too far.

Arguably, give or take the recent stumble in form that is perfectly understandable given the expectations the team have to haul around with them, the squad is its finest shape in years. Can we really maintain the idea that this is in no way connected to the Glazer's? I think not. I said as much in a recent UWS piece and was soundly dressed down by a fellow writer for my trouble. I get where he's coming from. He thinks I'm being naive and I think the same of him. If one of us has to be right, I would very much prefer it not to be me. Off the peg historical analogies are easy to find. They said the Titanic was unsinkable. That huge iceberg of debt looming in the path of the club we both love could well destroy us. But I just can't see it. And you can read that line in as many ways as you want.

Just like a team...

2009-04-07T13:37:00.004+01:00

For days the papers had been full of talk of miracles and messiahs, of saviours and divine interventions. Only, to confuse religious seasons, they'd all been following the wrong star. While the world expected the Messiah to stage his comeback at St James Park on Saturday, he actually slipped into the worlds gaze at about 5:45 pm on Sunday afternoon. For truly was a saviour born on Sunday.

I'm no United anorak. My knowledge of what's going on in the reserve ranks stretches no further than knowing that Ollie's cutting his managerial teeth down there, and will no doubt by infusing his charges with an abiding understanding of the United way. Clearly, judging by Sunday, he's having some impact. So my first acquaintance with the name Federico Macheda came on Sunday morning when the Observer tipped him for a place on the bench on the strength of a reserve hat-trick at the Messiah and miracle free zone that is St James'. My second came when I read a favourable reference to his efforts in UWS who were tipping his star to rise at the expense of Carlos Tevez's.

My third came courtesy of Alan Keegan as he announced the substitution. Within ten minutes, after a couple of rocky first touches, he'd minted one of those immortal, imperishable moments that you'll carry to the grave and that make supporting United the luckiest card fate can deal. The way the entire ground bounced for those closing minutes was a joy to behold.

Was it the start of a beautiful career or a glorious one-off that he'll never reproduce? Who knows or, for now at least, cares. Momentum is all that matters. And in that instant, it swung back to us. Take your eyes off that fucking perch Rafa.

Cup Runneths Over?

2009-01-23T22:01:00.002+01:00

When the book finally comes to be written on the slow, lingering death of the FA Cup (working title: ‘Manchester United Ruined our Cup’ – well it worked for Colin Shindler), United’s misadventure in Brazil will of course get a hefty chapter. But surely worthy of a little more than a footnote will be Harry Redknapp’s comment earlier this week about fielding his weakest possible side at Old Trafford tomorrow evening. Many possible reactions suggest themselves, chief among them ‘how will we possibly tell Harry’s weakest from his strongest line-up?’

Then there’s the slight issue of the contempt flung in the faces of those us who’ve been automatically cup schemed into forking out close to fifty quid for the pleasure of being there – not to mention in the faces of his own travelling support. Predictably Harry backtracked a little today, and we can chalk this up as another of his narky outbursts as he gets twitchily near to relegation.

Not that I’m here to whip up some fake outrage at his slighting of the venerable old competition. It’s clearly slid down the list of priorities right across the game and I class it along with the existence of Father Christmas and my love of Erasure as things that illuminated my childhood but have no place in my adult existence. What sticks in the craw is the fact that the real culprits behind the smothering of the cup are the Bolton’s and Boro’s of the world, the clubs that field drastically depleted sides because their sole priority is Premiership survival.

I’m not naïve. I understand the financial expediency behind such thinking. But when they finally find the murder weapon in this case, it won’t just be Alex Ferguson’s fingerprints all over it.

Viva La Vida!

2009-01-19T22:47:00.004+01:00

Prior to United’s departure for Japan there was much anxious calculation of exactly how wide the points gap between United and the supposed pretenders to our crown might be when we return. 3? 6? A totally insurmountable 9?

In the event, with Chelsea and Liverpool both letting points slip left, right and centre, it turns out that such speculation was utterly futile. Indeed as I write United have hopped back on the perch that we temporarily allowed Liverpool to occupy. When searching for negatives about the Japan trip, only one stands out – the red-card that will keep Vidic out of the Milan tie. For our impervious to peril Serb is having a season to truly cherish.

While others struggle to sustain their very finest form, Vidic has consistently been the outstanding performer in a red-shirt. That record-breaking run of clean sheets (like all records these days pertaining to no further back than the Premiership age) speaks for itself. Of course no defender operates alone, but, Edwin aside, who is the common denominator in all those games? Need you ask?

In many ways those 10 games without being breached are the defenders equivalent of scoring 42 in a season (I’d say that at this point Vidic is on the equivalent of 28, Johnny Evans is on a very creditable 11, and Rio about 15). Of course if Vidic’s performance was calculated in goals for rather than goals against, he would be strolling to Player of the Year awards. As Fergie himself lamented the other day, defenders rarely earn such plaudits.

Will we survive the San Siro without him? Milan themselves are suffering a slump in form, with Mourinho perhaps distracted by the likelihood of a fat contract at city about to cross his desk, but there’s no avoiding the fact that our task is immeasurably more difficult with Vidic missing from the side.

Feared by the blues...

2009-01-12T21:16:00.006+01:00

Admit it, you were worried when you saw the team. It’s taken a while, but you’ve finally come round to the fact that Michael Carrick is the creative pivot of the United midfield. Anderson might have the power, the hair, and the song, Scholes the vintage pedigree, but Carrick is currently the one with best passing range. So to discover that Fergie had seen fit to leave him on the bench and start with Giggsy in central midfield…against Lampard, Ballack and Deco. Optimism levels crashed quicker than the exchange rate.

You were probably less surprised by the inclusion of Fletcher. After all he’s Fergie’s equivalent of your Mum’s best cutlery, only brought out for special occasions like Christmas Day and playing Arsenal or Chelsea. Now you bow to no-one in your admiration of Giggsy, reckon the lad deserves a statue on the forecourt for all he’s done in a red shirt – though the statue should be made of him without one, twirling it above his head at Villa Park, every strand of chesthair loving crafted from marble – but anyone can see that these days all he’s up to is the odd run-out for sentiments sake, and Chelsea with this much at stake is no time for sentiment.

And so, as if we haven’t had enough down the years, here was yet another salient reminder not to doubt Sir Alex. If anyone looked drained of drive and inspiration in that midfield, it was Ballack, all £120, 000 a week of him. Ryan on the other hand, was at his sprightly best, haring all over the place, going on runs that made the years fall away, and leading by example at every turn.

With Benitez having gone into King Kev meltdown mode, it felt like the season finally clicked into focus this weekend. Suddenly the prospect of reeling Liverpool in and then unequivocally surpassing them when they come to OT in March, gives meaning and purpose to what had hitherto seemed a bit flat. Factor in Mourinho getting a well-merited spanking, not to mention the ongoing farrago at Middle-Eastlands and it all looks very tasty indeed.

Coda: Obviously a picture of Ryan would have been more appropriate in the circumstances, but that image was just too good to resist. And obviously Wayne played a blinder as well; when doesn't he?

Citizen Berbatov

2009-01-09T21:24:00.007+01:00

Can a football player ever be considered too highbrow? Not in the sense that he spends his spare time writing poetry rather than writing off brand-new Ferrari's or seeing to his blog via his laptop rather than seeing to lap dancers. Not in that way. But in the way that his appeal is limited to a discerning minority, a rarefied strata of supporters who consider themselves more refined than their lumpen red brethren.

For example I'm guessing that few match-going reds would be chuffed if they pitched up at the pictures to be greeted with a moody East European art-house flick in which nothing ever seems to happen and simply doesn't seem interested in pleasing them, when they expected some kind of high-octane chase-a-minute thrillathon with explosive climax after explosive climax.

Well I think we may well have signed the equivalent of that grainy art-house flick, and as one quite happy to fess up to many a lost afternoon in the Cornerhouse pondering obscure European cinema, I'm delighted. But I'm getting the impression this isn't the general view. Berbatov is a football purists dream. He is like the Citizen Kane of football, every shot a brilliantly thought-out, artfully composed masterpiece. And, like films of that calibre, his appeal seems destined to appeal more to the critics than the paying punters.

Languid is dismissed as lazy. Deft touches and an immaculate first touch are no substitute for racing up and down the pitch in pursuit of lost causes in the eyes of many at OT. Far better Tevez dashing aimlessly about the pitch than Dimitar dabbing a toe at the ball and directing it beautifully into Wayne's path. Such finesse is a precious rarity, but part of me feels that many of those in the ground would prefer to still have Alan Smith toiling up and down the turf.

Piece said, I'm off to read some Proust. Then watch Celebrity Big Brother.

Shirt-Changed

2008-08-20T13:10:00.006+01:00

I'd hesitate to call it a campaign or anything, but at the start of last season I wrote a post lamenting the disappearance of the half-time Cash Dash draw from Old Trafford. In my eyes, it was another tiny nail hammered in the coffin of the match-going experience, presumably the victim of the Glazer's bean-counters who expect the pitch at half-time to be the exclusive preserve of sponsor-friendly, revenue-generating penalty shoot-outs.

Well imagine my surprise arriving at the ground last weekend to be met by an army of ticket sellers for something going by the name of 'Shirt Off Their Backs'. (I think that was the name anyway. I'd check by consulting my ticket but it was chucked away when I failed to win). My heart did a little leap for joy and my hand was straight into my pocket for a quid. The Cash-dash was back!

Only, it wasn't really. Under what system of inflation can the item that was previously the runners-up prize suddenly become first prize? What's happened to the pretty bloody essential cash element of the draw? Where's my opportunity to get photographed shaking Kevin Webster's hand whilst holding a gaint cheque? Indeed where was the no-mark local celeb doing the honours with the tombola on the pitch? I feel duped.

The fact that the game was a desultory draw means that buying a ticket isn't immediately established as a necessary ritual of winning games, so I don't think I'll bother when we play our next home game sometime in November or whenever it is. Ah, well.

So long, Ronnie?

2008-06-08T11:52:00.001+01:00

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?

Scarf-aces!

2008-06-01T13:42:00.002+01:00

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.

Viva Ronaldo - Again!

2008-04-03T14:32:00.003+01:00

There are times when supporting United is to be mired in all that is soul-destroying about the modern game – the Game 39 nonsense, the unwanted (but not that unwanted) Wembley semi-finals, the debt-servicing (and is it me, or does this feel like a particularly bad moment to be saddled with astronomical levels of debt?). And then you see a ball being zipped about the pitch with such panache and aplomb, that everything ugly and disfiguring melts away and the true beauty of this game we all love shows its true face.

Such is it to be a United fan at the present moment. I scribbled down some thoughts after that sumptuous, rain lashed victory over Villa. Film makers of limited imagination are fond of turning on the rain machine when they want to evoke turbulent emotions. Rain-soaked kisses are one of the enduring clichés of the screen. Well, the rain did a similar job on Saturday evening – it was like one long, epic kiss.

Hollow hyperbole? Not even close. Ronaldo’s slick-flick, Rooney’s indomitable spirit finally getting its reward with a brace, and of course that header from Tevez, the sublime culmination of a move of magisterial artistry. How could they possibly follow that?

The answer of course was with the win against Roma, our finest performance on foreign soil since that Keano inspired victory in Turin. On Tuesday Ronaldo obliterated for good the lingering doubt about his ability to turn it on for the big occasions and assured himself of the European Player of the Year trophy regardless of whether we make it to Moscow. Rooney’s shimmy in the build-up to the goal was a thing of beauty, and all in all it was an object lesson in how football should be played.

Worries of all kinds (visa and tickets for Moscow, Vidic’s knee, the debt) can take a back seat as we just bathe in the glow of the knowledge that for now we are without doubt seeing the finest player in world football in his absolute pomp. What else can you say but Viva Ronaldo?

Viva Ronaldo!

2008-03-27T11:21:00.001+01:00

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…

Revel Yell

2008-03-08T21:07:00.006+01:00

As I write the airwaves of 5Live are thick with United fans lamenting our exit from the FA Cup. They are, understandably, incensed with the dismal standard of refereeing; they will probably, whining ingrates that 606 botherers tend to be, lambast Ronaldo or Rooney for failing to turn all that possession into a single measly goal. But their hunt for a scapegoat is unlikely to lead them to the real culprit, the real reason why we won't need to find the fare to Wembley this season; me.

Let me explain. I've seen United lose three times this season (seen as in been there, not watched on the box). Bolton, city and now Portsmouth. Until this afternoon, most people thought that the common factor in those defeats was the absence of Rooney. Today disproved that theory. No, the common factor in all three defeats was in what was absent from my own coat pocket; a packet of Revels.

As football fans we all have our own strange rituals that we cling to. I have dubbed I don't know how many pairs of socks and boxer shorts 'lucky' in my time, in the face of all the scientific evidence which showed my chances of pulling never improved a jot when i was wearing them, nor Uniteds chances of winning. This doesn't stop me rooting through the underwear drawer anxiously every matchday looking for my lucky red pants.

I'm at a loss to explain how a humble bag of Revels came to acquire mystical properties, but somewhere over the last two seasons it managed to. No visit to watch United was complete without me popping into a shop - usually the Aleef's at the top of Oxford Road - and getting my Revels fix.

Only for the three games mentioned circumstances conspired to keep me out of a shop. Today it was the fault of enterprising thieves who swiped the copper wiring from the trainlines just outside Farnworth, meaning that i was running massively late to the game and had no option but to jump on the last OT bound train from Oxford Road to make kick-off. Up-shot? No Revels.

Was I worried about this? Not at first anyway, as it appeared to be just a matter of when not if for United. Then Tevez had the shot cleared off the line, and I was starting to feel a little nervously in the pocket where I keep the charmed confectionary. When it became clear that some kind of force-field was in operation that would prevent the ball from crossing the line into the Portsmouth net, I was ready to leg it up Warwick Road to grab a bag of Revels there and then.

So sorry everybody. At least we can revel in the fact that it's a couple of hundred quid saved towards the cost of that touted ticket for Moscow. And we can revel further in the fact that Chelsea won't be there either. (Though the only downside here will be the inevitable crowing from the FA that the hordes of Barnsley bandwagon hoopers clamouring for tickets vindicates their decision to hold the semis at Wembley.)

As for me, copper piping thefts notwithstanding, I can assure you that my bag of Revels will definitely be in place for the visit of Liverpool in a fortnight.

Never say never...

2008-02-28T23:12:00.003+01:00

It’s all got a bit dark there for a while didn’t it? Needless to say about thirty minutes into the Arsenal game and all thoughts of renouncing my season ticket had utterly evaporated. It just goes to show that however much you think you’ve dosed yourself with a healthy sense of balance to offset the powerful gusts of hype that could convince any football fan that every single game is a matter of absolute life and death, you’re always at risk.

Viewed from today’s perspective the Derby is a still a memory that I don’t care to dwell on (perhaps that’s why so many dashed out early to get the scarves on e-bay and erase the painful memories?), but it no longer contaminates my every United related thought.

Better instead to dwell on that sumptuous performance against Arsenal, the aplomb with which Carrick is firing passes across the pitch like Scholes in his pomp, and the majestic, peerless presence of Rooney, the sole reason why I think I could never walk away as long as he’s pulling on a red shirt.

Him and Benzema up front together next year? How much do you want, Malcolm? Bargain.

Time to go?

2008-02-14T12:39:00.001+01:00

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.

Black Sunday

2008-02-10T21:52:00.000+01:00

So where do you start? With the nauseating sound of United fans clapping the city fans when they belatedly – by about, oh, 50 years – serenading Frank Swift? With the abject performance of virtually the entire United crowd – offering pretty conclusive proof that we’ll never experience a decent atmosphere at Old Trafford ever again; because if we can’t be arsed getting up for it today, then it’s probable we never will. With the even more abject performance of Rio Ferdinand – who played like his mind was wandering around the cosmetics department at Selfridges in town; though it almost feels unfair to single out one dismal performance from ten of them (Tevez being the only who can emerge from that with anything like credit).

Not since the debacle at the Riverside that precipitated Keano’s demise can I remember such a lacklustre United, one so utterly devoid of invention and ideas. It’s easy to silence all those doubts you have about how truly great United are when we’re knocking six past Newcastle. It’s easy to fall for the hype that tells you Ronaldo is the best player in Europe. Days like today tell you that the true measure of greatness comes when you perform in the biggest games – and don’t interpret that as a compliment to city; it wasn’t the opposition that was big today, it was the occasion – and too many big names failed to rise to it.

I’m pretty sure that at least one pundit tomorrow will make the point that city fans observed the minute’s silence immaculately, while the United fans observed the next 90 minutes silence even better. Sadly, they’ll be right on both counts.

Still, at least the scarves didn’t have AIG printed on them. I suppose in the current climate we should be thankful for that at least.

Hush

2008-01-23T22:02:00.000+01:00

So this minutes silence then. Our old friend Kevin Parker popped up in the media on Monday to urge United to rethink the silence due to be held before the forthcoming derby clash. Following chants of ‘We’re all going to the silver jubilee!’ at recent city games, Parker is understandably concerned that some bitters will gleefully wreck the tribute, and in doing so smear the good name enjoyed by city fans – his words not mine – and trigger god knows what reprisals from United.

Quite rightly, United knocked back the suggestion that this most solemn of occasions be marked with a minutes worth of applause instead, and we await February 10h itself to see how this one will play out.

While it’s tempting in this situation to just invite the city fans to show what they’re made of one way or another, I can’t help feeling that many United fans are relishing the prospect of a desecrated silence. Should a single blue voice be raised during that minute – and I’m pretty sure that more than a few will be – you’ll be able to taste the hatred in the air when the ref blows his whistle and the vitriol explodes. In recent times, few occasions at home will have touched it for a genuine, almost toxic sense of malice permeating the ground. Bearing in mind recent atmospheres, even in supposed grudge games, you can see why that might prove attractive.

And let’s be honest, there’s nowhere United fans feel more at home than on the moral high ground. Munich has always been the inarguable ace allowing us to justify any number of wrongs when it comes to songs. ‘Always look out for Turks wielding knives’? They started it with Munich. ‘City’s going down like a Russian submarine’? What about their Munich stuff? And, of course, Hillsborough, and further back, ‘Bill Shankly’s on his back’. Sick? What does that make their Munich songs?

While we wait to condemn city fans, it’s interesting to wonder how we’d conduct ourselves in a similar situation. Say we’re at Anfield around April 15th next year (the 20th Anniversary) is anyone really confident that every single United fan could be trusted to hold their tongues? It’s a view guaranteed to make me unpopular, but as far as I’m concerned as long as we sing ‘Murderers’ at anyone who ever put on a Liverpool shirt, then we’ve surrendered any right to occupy the moral high ground. Don’t agree? Sit and watch Jimmy McGovern’s ‘Hillsborough’ and see if you can still sing it then. Oh, but it’s about Heysel? That’s alright then. And so on.

So for me, I’ll howl along with everyone else when the city fans soil the silence, but I’ll do so believing that if it was us, we probably wouldn’t acquit ourselves that much better.

Come back Tom Tyrrell

2008-01-04T16:41:00.000+01:00

Since when did XFM have anything to do with football? I only ask because the station - purveyors of stodgy ‘indie’ guitar-rock to the people of the North West for about 18 months now – have this season assumed exclusive rights for radio commentaries on United games. This is one of two small, but to mind fairly significant, off the pitch changes that took place during the close season, neither of which have been much discussed in the red-related media. So I’ll discuss them now.

At least with Century there was some kind of footballing pedigree, if you can call it that, where the Legends have long broken up the never-ending stream of Rick Astley and Hazel Dean hits. On XFM football just sits there, totally incongruous, unrelated to anything around it, apart perhaps from the fact that the station overlords decided it sits well with the laddish demographic they so assiduously court. And didn’t XFM take the decision to lay off all daytime DJ’s last year, deeming them surplus to audience requirements? Were the savings made here really diverted into the Glazer debt-management fund?

I have a few problems with XFM, indeed I have problems with any radio station that’s interrupted by adverts every ten minutes (though the glut of adverts from city desperately trying to fill the boo camp are always good for a giggle). But XFM is just so middle of the road and safe, while at the same time thinking it’s totally cutting-edge, that it’s depressing. Even the mighty Dave Haslam seems somehow diminished on the station- his Friday night Weekender show rarely strays from the narrow confines of the playlist into the margins. As for the daytime…you’re never more than two records away from the Pigeon Detectives or others of their sorry ilk.

Artists you won’t hear on XFM: Grinderman, PJ Harvey, Robert Plant and Alison Kraus. Artists you will: The Pigeon Detectives, the Pigeon Detectives, and the Pigeon Detectives. See a pattern there?

Still at least they had the good sense to take Mickey Thomas with them, the only man who makes Paddy Crerand seem fairly neutral and objective when it comes to matters United.

As for the other change – can someone explain to me where the Cash-dash Draw has disappeared to? Now I realise this was a flawed system, but am I alone in finding something endearing in its very tackiness? To me the whole thing, from the ‘Who did he say?’ celebrity bounding onto the turf to be met with indifference at best and booing at worst, to the photo of the giant cheque – ‘Oh, that’s who it was!’ – in the next programme – it spoke of a world that wasn’t all corporate smoothness. Not to mention the smile and the word with the sellers on the way into the ground.

I always thought this was a remnant of United the family club, something other than a soulless machine designed to extract money from us customers. United’s still a family club of course; only the family concerned are the Glazer’s, who seem to add another oddball name to the list of directors every week.

Changes so small most seem hardly to have noticed them, but in their own small way, telling glimpses of what rules our club.

Oh what an atmosphere

2008-01-02T12:04:00.001+01:00

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.

Sleazy Does It

2007-12-22T14:37:00.001+01:00

And so the year ends with United tucked in behind Arsenal at the top of the table, awaiting an eminently winnable Champions League tie and an FA Cup visit to our happiest of hunting grounds. Admittedly, post-Rooney’s freak injury, form hasn’t yet touched the stellar heights of a couple of months back when United were playing football as bewitching as any I could remember, but, with the single exception of the Reebok, results have been superb. So, everything’s rosy then? Not quite.

The rum doings of the Christmas party have shone an unwelcome light on the ‘seedy antics’ of the first-team squad, and it’s not hard to imagine that Fergie is living in a permanent state of boiling apoplexy at the moment. When the tabloid dogs go sniffing with this kind of intent you can guarantee a daily stream of ever more lurid headlines. Even the quality press are getting in on the act with the Guardian today devoting a full page to the way United players supposedly ‘harvest’ the pick of the Selfridges and Harvey Nicks counters to garnish their parties.

At times like, this no amount of photos of Ronaldo wearing a Santa hat, giving the thumbs up next to some sickly kid in a hospital bed, are going to erase the noxious stench that arises from that image of a few first teamers – and Jonny Evans – swaggering in their virtually matching jeans and leather jacket ensembles, and similarly matching smirks, towards that ‘ill-fated night of sleaze and debauchery’.

It’s Paul Scholes I feel most sorry for (apart, obviously from Evans or the anonymous 26 year old woman, depending how that turns out). No player less deserves to have his image dragged into the mire than Scholesy, yet there he is strolling along. On Wednesday morning Nicky Campbell summoned the full extent of his moral superiority – no mean feat considering he has more of it than virtually any other individual in the country - to castigate all professional footballers for their moral failings, with particular reference to those that play for us. Well give me the humility of Paul Scholes any day over the posturing of a superannuated phone-in host.

And while we’re on the subject of what one must, in true tabloid spirit, refer to as that photo before that party, can someone please have a word with Gary Neville about his decision to attend the do wearing trainers.

How different to last year’s Christmas do when footage of the team indulging in a beery singalong of United songs underlined how strong team spirit was in the post-Van Nistelrooy era. Indeed they reprised the singing session again this year, but team spirit can perhaps go too far when five guests – the legal team no doubt warning them against anything more specific than that – shared the same receptacle later in the night.

When it all blows over and the tabloids have a new fleeting obsession to play with, we can get back to thinking about football. About that nagging thought that keeps telling you that Ronaldo bottles it in big matches. About that hope that Saha is going to ignite any second now and play like he did at the start of last season. And about the image of Red Square, packed with thousands of reds, pissed out of their heads.

Business as usual

2007-11-03T12:00:00.000+01:00

I’m maybe a bit naïve when it comes to politics. In spite of all the evidence that politicians are a bunch of grubby, venal, self-serving tossers, I try to maintain faith in the oppositeview, that they are public servants inspired with zeal to make the world a better place for the downtrodden and disenfranchised. I’ve never subscribed to the facile cliché that 'they’re all the same anyway’, with its ridiculous suggestion that Denis Skinner and David Cameron are interchangeable replicants.

Then someone goes and makes a statement that leaves you no option but to accept that politicians will always side with big business rather than the punters on the shop floor. In this instance, that someone is the top man himself, Gordon Brown, who has rushed to distance himself from the musings of his sports minister on the way obscene money is disfiguring the beautiful game.

Not so, says Mr Brown, clearly not wanting to ruffle the feathers of anyone who might be in a position to help his election campaign whenever he plucks up the courage to actually call one. When I saw Gerry Sutcliffe’s comments on Friday morning I can’t have been alone in thinking 'about time too', finally a politician willing to go further than mealy-mouthed muttering, and actually say what everyone thinks. How disappointing then that his boss should come out and slate him for his comments and by doing so reveal exactly whose pocket he’s kept in.

Not that Brown came out and slated Sutcliffe himself. That would be far too honourable. No, instead he opted for the craven politicians favourite gambit of anonymous briefing, and by doing so lost the respect of this particular voter for good. Brown wasn’t alone in rubbishing Sutcliffe’s comments of course. Gill and co trotted out the usual spiel, though we already knew his soul was hollowed out the minute Glazer set up camp in the boardroom. More amusingly, Fergie revisited his infamous ‘fuck off and watch Chelsea’ strop, by suggesting that Sutcliffe should go and join ‘that mob who watch United FC’, reminding us all how far that particular Union firebrand has travelled from his socialist roots.

If I wasn’t so naïve about politicians maybe I wouldn’t be so surprised or bothered by any of this, but that’s just the way I’m built. Anyway, here’s to Rooney, Tevez and Ronaldo carving up Arsenal this lunchtime…

How red are you?

2007-06-26T12:50:00.000+01:00

My recent foray into the piranha filled waters of the MUFC/FCUM debate got me thinking about differing degrees of redness and what constitutes ‘acceptable ways’ of supporting United. Obviously the first question to address, would be ‘acceptable to who?’ Well as the person writing this thing, that would be me of course, sole arbiter of taste and good sense.

There are some reds out there that have serious issues with any of our number who belong to the so-called ‘post -93 crowd’, in other words those who weren’t around for the famine years of the 70’s and 80’s, but who hopped on the United juggernaut when we were steeped in Cantona inspired success. I’ve always felt this was a little harsh on anyone who has the misfortune to actually have been born ‘post-93’, a group who are now entering their teenage years and will always have their redness questioned by the fact that they impertinently chose not to born during the early 70’s. What kind of commitment's that?

Then of course there’s the vexed issue of out of town support. I have to declare an interest here. I was born in Oldham and now live in Bolton. By rights I should have followed the example of the Ginger Prince himself and opted for a life following Latics. Foolishly, I chose instead to follow the example of my United supporting big sister, and as a result had to ensure a good 15 years of pretty barren fare before I saw United lift the title. (And I’m aware that I can hear the tuning up of several worlds tiniest violins by mates who elected to go to Boundary Park).

I’ll admit I’m torn on the out of town debate. Part of me applauds the effort required to slog up to Manchester for a United game and commends the commitment that it demands. I also realise – as alluded to above – that as one born a few miles from an M16 postcode – I’m not really in a position to cast stones. There’s a bloke sat behind me, and every red knows someone similar, who treks from London for every game, whose red credentials couldn’t be questioned, does every Euro away, the lot; making him a far more committed red than I could ever hope to be.

All that said, why can’t I stop myself from bristling everytime I hear another cockney braying about Man U on the tram? Why was I so irritated by the three tits from Sheffield singing ‘We’ve won it two times…’ on the tram before the West Ham game? Why did I despair at Villa Park when a bloke in a United shirt asked me, in a Geordie accent, if that was Liam Gallagher, when Ian Brown trundled by with his kids?

Maybe it’s just bad luck that all these acts of cluelessness were perpetrated by non-Mancs, but it feels like a pattern to me. The fact of the matter is of course that United’s support is just a microcosm of football support at large, and with there being more United fans it means there’s more members of every group, from JCL glory-hunters to those who sport the right trainers, read the right paper, and think the right things.

Which brings me to the question of whether you to have to actually attend matches to consider yourself a red? Some would say that this is an intrinsic part of being a red, but again I’m not so sure. Are those who ditch United because they refuse or are simply unable to fund Glazer’s debt any less red than those for whom money is no object in the Exec boxes? Is the kid I know with severe special needs that lives and breathes United but only gets to go once or twice a season, any less red for that? I make two away games a year at most, and have never done a Euro away; not even the Nou Camp in 99. Does that mean I must relinquish my rights to class myself as a red?

In recent months I’ve been more embarrassed by the antics of some of those who would categorise themselves as proper reds, than I have by the Megastore fodder that we realistically can’t afford to do without. United’s a big family, there’s room for one and all, but please can everyone just promise two things; never to use the words ‘Man U’ and to learn the difference between Liam Gallagher and Ian Brown. Thanks.

PS Yes, I know the pictures a cheap shot. Sorry.

Is the soul still one?

2007-06-26T10:33:00.000+01:00

I’m on the train home after the West Ham game (heading to Bolton if you’re thinking of questioning my right to mouth off about matters United). The vibes, considering we’ve just been handed the League title, are damp. Maybe it’s the weather, maybe the result of the game, maybe it’s the nature of the corporate stamped, stage-managed presentation ceremony, as far removed from the genuine euphoria at the end of the two forays to Merseyside as you can possibly get. But I never expected winning the league could feel as deflating as this.

I’m flicking listlessly through Red Issue, when the bloke sat opposite me pipes up with, ‘I don’t read that shit anymore,’ He’s a bit pissed, so I don’t really fancy taking him on, but being a courteous sort, I ask why? ‘Too much politics. Too much FC. Fucking traitors.’ He spits out the words – alright initials – FC with maximum scorn, the kind of pure venom you’d expect United fans reserved for the words city, Leeds or Liverpool. ‘They’re still United,’ I offer by way of response. ‘Bollocks!’ is the curt reply. I sense that we’re not going to hit it off and steer the conversation towards a subject that all United fans can agree on, the urgent need to offload Kieran Richardson. I get off at Bolton, and he continues to the Mancunian heartlands of Barrow. And yes I am aware that’s a fine example of a pot having a go at a kettle of mildly darker hue.

I offer this by way of illustration of the current standing of FC and its supporters in the eyes of many of those who stayed behind at Old Trafford. Two years on from the start of the American occupation of OT – with Gill still doing a fine job in the poodle-Blair role, lobbed a juicy bone in the shape of his million pound salary – woe betide any United fan who wades into the treacherous waters of the state of the union between the MUFC/FCUM factions. United We Stand, in print and online, bravely keep the arguments alive, but anyone willing to stick their head over the parapet usually gets it splattered in a hail of vitriol and gob. But here goes anyway.

One problem is that it’s almost impossible to discuss the issue without resorting to emotive language. Those who claim that they ‘stood by’ Big United imply betrayal on the part of those who moved to FC. Those on the other side of the fence who flaunt their greater integrity and purity of soul, do so at great risk of alienating those of us who no matter how much angst it involved, opted to stay at Old Trafford.

Last season saw a digging in and entrenchment on both sides. For Big United fans, it was a season of unexpected glory with United playing utterly peerless football of the sort not seen anywhere else in Europe, never mind in the North-West Counties League Division 2. For many it was a vindication of their decision to stay at Old Trafford, proof that the Glazer regime needn’t inhibit the tradition of swaggering football that’s the true spirit of United. Factor in the close season spending spree, which is certain to see expectations for next season ratcheted to ridiculous levels, and many will no doubt be wondering why we all made a fuss about the Glazers in the first place. Why fret about politics when we’ve got a midfield containing Ronaldo, Scholes, Hargreaves, Nani, Carrick, Giggs, Anderson (and of course Fletcher) to drool over?

The answer comes in the form of the jacked-up prices, handily made public the day after the AC victory, that will see United fans screwed out of more money at the exact moment when other clubs are freezing prices, knowing that the cash deluge from the new TV deal means they’ll still be turning massively inflated profits. On the surface it might not be politics preventing many reds from renewing this summer, but the underlying forces have been put in motion by the Glazers need to manage that mind-boggling level of debt.

Many make the claim that it doesn’t matter who owns the club as ‘they’re all the same anyway’. I refute this in relation to football club owners, just as much as when I hear it applied to politicians – Dennis Skinner and David Cameron are the same are they?. The Glazer’s financed the United deal at little risk to themselves, plunging a once solvent, well managed club into the kind of debt that can never be fully wiped out. And they did so because they assumed that we were mugs, sources of cash that would never question or query their business as long as they kept us distracted by matters on the pitch.

The way that supporters of most other Premiership clubs have rolled over and waved their legs in the air the minute an American sugar-daddy has hoved into view, proves that they have a point, but United fans are different; or some of them are anyway. It’s unrealistic to imagine you’ll ever have a totally politicised, engaged support; there’ll always be a majority indifferent to what some – me amongst them I suppose – would impose as the ‘proper’ way to support United. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep the arguments alive. I sometimes get a sense of some FC fans having a ‘redder than thou’ mentality, but it’s still possible to be an Old Trafford going red without being an apologist for Glazer, just as FC doesn’t constitute some kind of betrayal.

So next season, when Ronaldo’s racing down the wing, and Rooney’s caressing it into the net with the daintiest of touches, remember that it’s still political.

Carry on up the boo camp

2007-06-24T10:01:00.001+01:00

This blog’s been derelict for a while now; windows boarded over, weeds cluttering the back yard, nothing going on. In fact, I thought I’d abandoned it for good. Then the other day, while reading a piece about the takeover at the boo camp, I came across the following quote and I knew at once that my mojo was back. Take a second and drink in its majesty:

Kevin Parker, of the Manchester City Official Supporters' Club said: "This is a great opportunity for us. We can start laughing at other people as we rise up the Premiership."

Beautiful isn’t it? Now, I’m sure that Kevin doesn’t speak for all city fans, indeed I’ve read some comments from the more clued-up wing of their support (the ideas of clued up city fans putting the moron in oxymoron of course) and many are uneasy about the prospect of selling out to a man with a dubious human rights record, currently facing corruption charges in his own land, but you’ve got to admire the ridiculous optimism in Kevin’s words.

For a while I thought only a city fan, with their infinite capacity for self-delusion, could be capable of such naïve nonsense, but thinking about it, maybe its symptomatic of what all football fans go through. Don’t we all have a talent for wilful amnesia, erasing the scars and memories of disappointments past as we look forward to the prospect of a trophy-laden future? Then I thought, no, he’s just a typical city knob.

Only supporters of one team could get so giddy about what will inevitably be another farcical chapter in the clubs richly farcical history. But it gets better of course. Like a moment from a Marx brothers film when you think the mayhem and lunacy couldn’t get more frantic, it goes up a notch and become even more hysterical. Who will he appoint as manager? Why, renowned philanderer and tabloid dupe Sven Goran Erikson of course.

Did they learn nothing from the Keegan era? Does the idea of appointing another manager left broken – but in Sven’s case definitely not left broke – by the experience of managing England not give some pause for thought? Clearly not. It could be argued that Sven’s reputation has been unfairly roughed up by the ‘feral beast’ that is the British press. Or indeed that the so-called ‘golden generation’ the he presided over turned out to be more ‘gold-plated’; plating that the press hysterically coated them in, before just as gleefully peeling it off. But it wasn’t the hacks who took Theo Walcott to Germany, or who lacked the tactical nous to salvage any game slipping away from them.

And, to paraphrase Mrs Merton, you have to wonder what Sven sees in the £2 million a year management position at a team who last season scored the fewest goals in Premiership history. It’s just another example of the obscene sums that slosh through the Premiership, which make for the surreal situation of a manager uuming and aahing between city and Juventus. One offers prestige, history, class; the other an absolute shit-load of cash.

It’s been a tough week for city fans all told. The Thaksin stuff came as they were still trying to come to terms with the news that Wayne Rooney would be carrying Ricky Hatton’s belt into the ring in Vegas. Then top blue Bernard Manning snuffed it. Rumours that Rooney is carrying the coffin at the funeral can’t be confirmed as I write. But with optimism like Kevin Parker’s I’m sure that the blues will have the last laugh. Don’t they always?

Phil Will Tear You Apart Again!

2007-04-28T19:50:00.000+01:00

What a week! Seven days ago I was trudging out of Old Trafford absolutely convinced that we'd blown the title. Forget all that counterintuive nonsense that I'd fooled myself with after the Portmouth game, this time I knew for certain that the game was up. Chelsea would thrash Newcastle. We'd probably bottle it against Milan, and end the season potless. Queueing for the tram I sent a text to the Mrs advising her to hide anything sharp or that could be fashioned into a noose. It was to be a dark weekend.

Fast forward to about 3 o'clock Sunday afternoon and I'm sprinting round the front room singing 'Mourinho are you listening?' and contemplating running over the road to hug my Geordie neighbour. Maybe it's not over after all.

Cut to Tuesday and the absolute delirium when Wayne belted that ball into the back of the net. Considered rationally we're still in a pretty tight spot for the second leg, but as I floated out of the ground, still singing away, rational analysis wasn't at the forefront of my mind. It didn't just feel like the tie was won, but the trophy as well.

Then comes Wednesday and the hammer blow that the Glazer's have seen fit to stick a fiver a game on the cost of my seat, taking my season ticket to a whopping £836. Of course I don't have to sit in such a prime piece of Old Trafford real estate, and even though i've only been in the seat a season, it'd feel like a wrench to relocate. But with most other teams freezing prices on the back of the windfall from the new TV deal you have to start questioning just how much you're willing to let your loyalty be taken for granted. Final decisions are yet to taken. Much thought remains to be done.

So to today, and I'm still mulling over what i'll do next season whilst fretting about our missing defence and wondering if there's truth in all these stories that Fergie and Saha have had a terminal bust-up. Everton score first. Worrying, but it's early, and we haven't got going yet. Then we do get going, dominating the game. But Everton score again, and Rooney's first touch is once again looking a bit rough.

But somehow, unlike at Portsmouth, I knew. I knew that we'd come back, not to just to equalise, but to win. And how. I'm sure eventually Phil Neville will allow himself a rueful smile, but he's too good a professional to do it for a while yet. Nonetheless, once a red, always a red. Mourinho has spent the week indulging in mind games, but the only important talking gets done on the pitch, and as we've seen today, with new regulations or the old ones, United are ready to be champions. Bring on Milan!

Forza United!

2007-04-11T16:27:00.000+01:00

Well, what can you say? There are nights when all the rubbish that comes with being a United supporter can cause you to doubt whether it's worth the mither. You know the stuff; the inability to get through 90 minutes, regardless of the opposition, without singing about Liverpool; the generous way that the club rewards our loyalty by sticking another couple of quid on the ticket price; the fact that Kieran Richardson is still allowed in the ground, never mind onto the pitch.

And then there are nights like last night, when every flicker of irritation floats into the night sky and United carry you to a place, supporters of few other teams will ever be privileged to visit. At half-time you could have told me that the Glazers had decided on the spur of the moment to take another £46 from my bank and I wouldn't have cared a jot, such was the sublime nature of what was on show before us.

No one who wore red last night - well Richardson apart maybe - should not share in the deluge of praise. The Guardian gave Fletcher a stingy 7 out of 10 this morning, when it was quite clear that he was playing the game of his life and was worthy of a 10 at least. As for the like of Carrick and Ronaldo, we'd have to turn it up to 11 to rate their performances.

After the jitters of Pompey and a start in which Totti had tried a couple of speculative long-range efforts, clearly hoping that Van der Saar would parry them to a grateful Roma poacher, what happened next was simply beyond imagination. This was football with a tempo, a verve, a freewheeling brilliance that would surely obliterate any opposition.

And what next? The prospect of a United and Liverpool final is shimmering into view. Yes it's a bit ominous that Chelsea are out '99ing by chasing on four fronts and plucking late winners out of nowhere on a weekly basis, but when it counts, I fancy Benitez to outwit Mourinho. Which means that truncheon manufacturers will need to go into overdrive to meet the demand a United/Liverpool final will involve.

But we'll worry about that another time. Today's all about shutting your eyes and seeing those glorious, dream-like sweeps upfield again. Ben Foster-less Watford, you're next.

We'll Never Die!

2007-04-07T20:11:00.000+01:00

I think the operative word tonight will be 'counter-intuitive'. It's not a word that I've ever had cause to use before, and I'm not totally confident that I could fully explain what it means. Indeed, it's probably the kind of ghastly, trendy jargon - like the pearler 'ideation' - that the pumped full of Power Manual Toss vessels who appear on the Apprentice would use. But it's the word that popped into my head as I plunged my hands into a sink full of dirty pots and tried to make sense of what I'd just watched on the telly.

United lost. My natural reaction at this point in the season, given that it's our second consecutive defeat - a fact that will be drummed home incessantly between now and Tuesday night - would be to give in to despair, to wallow in gloom, to embrace darkness. To flail at the cruel hand of fate, or the cruel hand of the referee that didn't point to the spot. Or the cruel hand of Sir Alex for handing in a team sheet on which he'd scribbled the words Kieran Richardson, tantamount to giving the opposition a one-nil start in my book.

Normally I'd know for sure that it was all over. Chelsea have won it and there's nothing we can do about it. I'd spend the evening in the mother of all moods, enveloped in black misery, vowing that that's it, I'm never putting myself through this again. But not this time. This time I'm going to be counter-intuitive.

A few minutes after pressing 'Publish' I will be downstairs getting nicely sloshed listening to the mighty fine new album by The Bees. Then I'll watch Borat. I'll remind myself that this was always likely to be the game where we'd come unstuck, given the fact that it's sandwiched between the two Roma games, the first of which was more testing and tumultuous than we could ever have possibly imagined. I'll remind myself that the intricate play didn't quite come off tonight, but it will again. I'll remind myself that though our finest players were fitful and indifferent tonight, next time they won't be.

I'll think against what I would usually think. Which I think is what it means to be counter-intuitive. I think we'll still win the league. I think, you think I'm right.

Countdown to Squeaky Bum Time

2007-02-24T12:07:00.000+01:00

The eyes are still a bit red, but at least they’ve stopped streaming now. Not that this had anything to do with the over-zealous methods of the Lens gendarmes, it was purely the result of dismay at Barcelona’s feeble capitulation to the Scousers. As the Guardian pointed out yesterday, some responsibility must lie with the layer of flab settling around Ronaldhino’s midriff, and on the evidence of Wednesday’s performance it looks like the only thing that could induce him to track-back is the promise of a tub of Ben and Jerry’s waiting for him in the box. Such behaviour is fine when the magic is flickering from his boots, but when it fails to ignit, it might be time to acknowledge that perhaps there is some logic to this regular training lark.

So why, on a blog dedicated to United, indeed one that hasn’t been updated for a month, and in a week when United have been at the centre of controversy on and off the field, do I choose to break my silence by carping about Liverpool’s breathtaking/exhilarating (delete according to whichever fawning report you happen to be reading at the time) comeback in the Nou Camp?

The fact is, like no other team, Liverpool get under the skin, and with our visit to Anfield a mere seven days away, nervousness starts to set in. By next week a nine-point gulf should have opened up between us and Chelsea, and an appointment with Boro or West Brom in the next round of the Cup booked. Factor in that the visit of Lille should amount to little more than a formality – although one certain to be played out against a particularly rancorous atmosphere, and I’m already smacking my lips and breaking out the canisters of pepper spray in anticipation, and an air of serenity should settle over every United related thought. So why doesn’t it?

United’s performance in France was as bitty and disjointed as any we’ve witnessed this season. Yes, we finally succeeded in winning away in Europe, but the performance of certain players causes me to fret a bit. Scholes and Carrick were shadows of the midfield duo who have towered over the Premiership week in, week out, while Ronaldo was at his frustrating worst, an ineffective display topped off with a teenage strop when he was packed off to the bench. Saha, as he did against Reading a few days earlier, had one gilt-edged chance, and fluffed it.

Mitigating circumstances aren’t difficult to discern. The pitch was in a dire state, Ronnie was barged about from the word go, and the goings-on on the terraces must have inevitably proved a distraction. Yet in spite of this, I’m worried about the fact that, by universal consent, we had the easiest draw, and were made to look ordinary, while the Scousers had possibly the toughest (Lyon notwithstanding) and went and did the job.

My fear is that the current United team look invincible when pitted against mediocre opposition – for which we can read all but three teams in the Premiership, but look anything but invincible when matched by opponents with any combination of skill, nous and guts. Arsenal have beat us twice; we held Chelsea but we were clinging on towards the end; yes, we swatted Liverpool aside with minimum fuss at OT, but they appear a different outfit now, just as we were in the latter half of last season. Put bluntly, are we a team of Thierry Henry’s, fated to always go missing for the big occasions, then to strut about throwing big I-am shapes for the little ones? Have we got the stomach for the fight about to commence?

We’ll find out very soon.

Pipe down Pompey

2007-01-26T21:27:00.000+01:00

The draw for the fourth round of the FA Cup, might not have all the romance and resonance of the third round, but it's still rich with exotic possibilities. Will we get another chance to travel to some poxy hovel like Northampton? Will it be another opportunity for Kieran Richardson to be outclassed by some third division outfit or other? Or will we get the chance to visit or be visited by Liverpool or city with away allocations generous enough to create a truly cracking atmosphere? Or will we get Portsmouth at home? That would be the latter then.

Portsmouth are one of those teams that I forget I dislike quite as much as I do, until the first chorus of 'Play up Pompey' makes it all come flooding back. As a team they don't really bother me. Redknapp is doing a decent job of building a retirement community for ageing defenders, with Lauren the latest to move into a lovely secure maissonette by the sea, with its own panic button just in case you see David James running towards you with no chance of claiming the ball.

James has somehow survived the fact that he has graced both city and Liverpool without becoming an object of total hatred. Even more incredibly, he now writes a column for the Observer, a position that I asssumed you had to be an Arsenal season-ticket holder to hold down. When Portsmouth played at OT earlier this season, the more mutton-headed faction among our support serenaded him with 'Murderers'. Considering that James was once involved in a fatal road crash, this was more than ordinarily insensitive, but considering he is a player of rare intelligence and sense, it reflected none too well on our fans.

But several things do irritate me about Pompey, that bloke above for one, who you can gaurentee will be on screen more than Wayne Rooney tomorrow night. The self-congratulory way in which they applauded Arsenal for eviscerating them a couple of years ago also sticks in the craw. United fans salute opposition class when they see it, but we don't expect the BBC to eulogise us for years for doing so (it's a cert that it will be mentioned when we go four up tomorrow, and i'm equally sure they won't clap us, just sing 'Support your local team' a bit louder).

Then there's Harry Redknapp himself. The draw was hardly made before he was going on about twice knocking United out before. Again it's a cert that the pre-game build up will concentrate on this angle, as if the peak of his career was Di Canio's freak goal. Let's hope he doesn't get to do it a third time, and that Rooney bags a jesters hat full.

Gutted After All

2007-01-21T20:00:00.000+01:00

Losing’s never quite that straightforward though is it? 10 minutes in, United already in cruise control, the warm, fuzzy vibes from yesterday’s results still hovering over the front-room, I was the picture of tranquillity. Then Eboue sinks to the turf clutching his face at the slightest of brushes from Rooney’s hand and the old bile erupts to the surface and I remember that, though it’s easy to be all rational and dispassionate two days before the game, it’s another thing entirely in the heat of the battle.

And as the game wears on, every shot of Wenger remonstrating over some imagined injustice or other (though, Gary Neville was more than a little lucky to get away with that leg across Henry in the first-half, even Paddy Crerand would have to concede that), cranks up the venom even more, to the point where I’m virtually foaming at the mouth.

The pessimist in me could feel it coming at the end, but the pessimist in me always can, believing even when we’re four-nil up with two minutes to play that some horrifying capitulation is still on the cards. Tomorrow the table will still show up a six point gap, but for tonight giving Henry the opportunity for one of his smug goal celebrations still smarts.

Head over heart

2007-01-19T22:00:00.000+01:00

Is it wrong to look ahead to this weekend’s pair of ‘Grand Slam’ matches in an entirely pragmatic frame of mind? Of course I’d like to see the minting of a few more immortal images to be filed in the memory bank alongside Keano barging through the Arsenal defence to slot home in 99 or Fergie doing his jig and pumping his fists to the United end in 2003 – but ultimately the desire for romance is outweighed by the simple need to maintain the gap between us and Chelsea.

Like most United fans I’m working on the assumption that Chelsea won’t drop a single point between now and the end of the season, giving us the opportunity to lose two games without totally screwing our chances of the title. This leads onto the thought of which games we’re most likely to squander the points in. For Chelsea to maintain an unbeaten surge between now and the end of the season would of course require them to beat us. This can’t be allowed to happen.

After being forced to put on a coronation for Chelsea at Old Trafford two years ago, and the horrible capitulation at the Bridge last season, the script demands that the tables are turned this year, and we will obliterate Mourinho’s hopes of three in a row on their own patch. Although technically this means that we can afford to lose two games before the meeting with Chelsea, I’d still be happier if we have a three point cushion lying spare, you know, just in case the script, as the cliché insists it often must, gets mislaid.

I suppose we have to eliminate Anfield and the Council House from the list of places where we’re happy to drop points. Liverpool surely can’t prove to be as abject – on and off the pitch – as they were at Old Trafford, but any title that involves defeat at Anfield is tarnished a little. As for city, it’s about time that we meted out the spanking that is so long overdue, and when could be a better time than with the title homing into view?

Which, of the big fixtures remaining – sorry Bolton fans, your visit in March doesn’t count – leaves Sunday’s game at the Emirates. Which is where my pragmatism comes in. Should we happen to lose on Sunday, I’m certain I’ll be gutted, but it won’t hurt in the same way defeat at Anfield or Stamford Bridge would. The pessimist in me has already written off our chances for Sunday, ludicrous considering the imperious way in which Paul Scholes performed last week and the fact that Rooney’s ill-luck in front of goal has to end sooner or later.

But the pessimist wins out. My biggest hope is that we match the result tomorrow. If Chelsea win, so must we; ditto a draw, and if the scousers should prevail, for once the cheeky smile on Wenger’s face at the end of the game won’t bother me a jot.

A Rooney hat-trick would be nice though, wouldn’t it?

King Henrik?

2007-01-07T11:18:00.000+01:00

So, many years after it was first mooted, this afternoon he finally arrives at Old Trafford. Back when he was taking the Scotland by storm and transforming a two horse race into a canter for one, you could barely chuck a stone at Old Trafford without hitting someone who had it on unimpeachable authority that he was United bound in the summer. Of course, like so many other done deals, the speculation proved entirely free of any proximity to the truth. But this afternoon he'll stroll out from the tunnel to meet the acclaim of a not quite full house. But enough about Martin O' Neill, today's all about Henrik Larsson. (Though, before we get to Henrik, who can forget O'Neill's priceless cameo's in recent World Cups, playing just off Alan Hansen, blindsiding Lineker with his unexpected shimmies from left-field)?

Larsson's affair with United looks set to be a fleeting one, but I'm confident that it will be consummated with a goal against Villa's rather leaky defence this afternoon. In fact were it not for the thrill and the lure of seeing Larsson perform in a red shirt, I know that I'd be trudging along this afternoon more out of a sense of duty than anything else. (That said, the terms of the season ticket that Malcolm kindly agreed for me stiplulate that I was paying for a ticket regardless.)

Indeed, Villa twice at home in the space of seven days would normally have me plunging the depths, but the Larsson factor should put a bounce in my step and carry me through games that have an atmosphere that usually owes a lot to chlorofoam. Villa fans will regale us with the traditional hymns of visitors suffering a dearth of originality and wit. United will respond by snoring a little bit louder. Hopefully that pattern will be broken by the dazzling performance from our newest old codger.

While Ronaldo has quite righly soaked up the plaudits in recent weeks, it has to be noted that the platform for our so far, so brilliant season is the rejuvenation of Scholes and Giggs. Scholes continues to be one of the most elusive players on the pitch, inhabitiing his own little time zone, where the seconds seem to freeze, allowing him freedom to just drift past opponents. It's probably the gift of a magnetic first touch that cushions the ball with a delicacy that borders on the miraculous.

Giggs has been on equally splendid form. The familiar groans of derision that for a long time soundtracked his game, have long been silenced (latching onto John O Shea at the moment instead), and the accuracy of his passing is a thing of wonder and beauty. Such has been the form of this pair and Ronaldo that it's shielded the lumbering, labouring performances of Wayne Rooney from too much scrutiny. Should a dip in form occur - and with the title so delicately poised, we pray it doesn't - Rooney can expect to come in for a fierce interrogation from the press.

For now, that fear can subside and we look forward to Larsson removing Chelseas's lingering grip on the title before he returns home in the spring.

P.S. Resepct to the Liverpool fans for their vehement show of disgust at the Sun at the start of last nights game. What's the betting United fans sing 'Justice for the 39' today though?

Interstellar Overdraft

2006-12-23T18:50:00.000+01:00

Now my grasp of economics is rudimentary at best. For proof of this you need look no further than my bank accounts monthly slide towards the red. Going back a bit further I can cite my C in Economics A-Level, the final product of two years spent alternating between bafflement and boredom. So my grasp of fiscal good sense is shaky in the extreme.

That said, I’m versed in the fact that money is ultimately an entirely notional, abstract concept. Goods and services have no innate value in themselves, we merely attach arbitrary values that float free of reality. Who decides that The Most Talked About Footballer of his Generation should earn more than the nurse tending the elderly and infirm this Christmas Eve? With both of these things said I’m finding it impossible to get my head around the mind-boggling levels of debt that continue to accumulate on the back of the Glazer takeover as revealed in the Times the other day.

All money may well be notional, but the notion of £656 million is just a little too abstract for me to wrap my head around. Try as I might, I simply can’t fathom how the Glazers plan to turn United into a profit-making organisation. The phrase voodoo economics seems particularly apt, but what little information trickles out of the Glazer camp provides little indication of how they plan to pull off the ultimate conjuring trick and make the debt disappear.

In the circumstances it’s virtually impossible not to find the pledges made about stadium naming rights and collective TV bargaining disingenuous. At least they’re upfront about exhibition matches straddling the globe, but the acres of empty seats on the most recent jaunt abroad should prove salutary here. Ticket prices will of course rise, the elasticity of our loyalty no doubt being tested to its utmost. According to the Times the Glazer’s feel that tickets at Old Trafford are undervalued when compared with other Premiership clubs, essentially those clustered around the capital. Of course they neglect to point out the fact that many workers in the Northwest are equally under-valued in comparison to their Southern counterparts.

The only glimmer of positivity to emerge from the Times report was the dismissal of Chelsea’s prospects of ever competing with United in the domain of, and a chill passes over the soul as I even contemplate using these words, brand recognition. Unless Kenyon will be able to manufacture a history for his adopted first-love by 2014, his chances of making good on his claim that Chelsea will be a bigger name than United look utterly hopeless.

Meanwhile the level of debt continues to soar, and the Glazers believe that we’ll be happy to be fobbed off with the purchase of a Galactico every couple of seasons. I’d like to think that they’re wrong, but deep inside, I worry that they could be right.

Deal

2006-12-17T20:36:00.000+01:00

I rarely travel to away games, particularly ones in that there London - and if you think that robs me of the right to pontificate on United related matters, well I'm partially inclined to agree, but degrees of fandom is an issue I don't want to dwell on here. Anyway, this meant I could skip the post-mortem from Upton Park - which no doubt consisted mostly of Keys and Gray chuckling at what a wag Jose is and how justified he was in his smug conviction that Chelsea would ease past United before too long - and get stuck straight into Deal or No Deal.

Before long I was wrapped up in the game and all the foul-mouthed rage that had filled the living room a few minutes earlier, had evaporated quicker than a 9 point lead. When the banker weighed in with a penultimate offer of £41,000 I was screaming at the TV urging her to take it. When she declined I could sense implosion looming. But it never materialised, and by the end, only the 250,000 and 10,000 remained. The banker offered in excess of 100, 000 (the precise amount escapes me) and, quite sensibly, she dealt. Quids in, and the fact that if she'd have held her nerve she would have scooped the 250,000 which was sitting plump in front of her throughout the game, was a mere technicality.

What does all this have to do with United? Well, if at the start of this season you'd have offered me a two point lead over Chelsea going into Christmas, no real injury issues - in fact the treatment room clearing out in preparation for the festive season -,Henrik Larsson in the wings poised to wreak havoc in the Premiership, I would have said 'Deal' faster than Ronnie tearing down the touchline. In short I'd have taken the £100,000 and not let the fact that it could have been 250K bother me, just like I refuse to let the fact that it could still be a five point lead steal all my pre-festive cheer.

So, United two points clear of the rent-boys? Deal or no deal?

Deal

With hatchets, hammers and moustache trimmers

2006-12-08T15:15:00.000+01:00

Less than 24 hours to go to the first derby of the season, and I'm sure that the residents of Stockport are already grooming their moustaches in anticipation - removing a few stray foodstuffs that have been lodging in the bristles for a couple of months while they're about it - as they ready themselves to show us what being a real football fan is all about. No doubt they will - hilariously - serenade us with cries of USA, and remind us that, courtesy of their wonky geography and skewed grasp of history, they are the only football team to come from Manchester.

Most amusingly, they will sing that nonsense about the invisible man and not being really here, the irony of the fact that, unless they're playing Man United, they very rarely are, being totally lost on the lazer blue brigade.

Indeed when I happened to flick on Sky on Monday night - part of a Clockwork Orange style attempt to make my daughter flinch at the merest glimpse of a blue shirt - I assumed that some sort of emergency evacuation of the ground was underway so vast were the expanses of empty seats. But it was raining. And it was a Monday night. And it was only Watford. And it's nearly Christmas. And did you know we once took 500,000 to Blackburn?

Of course it must be disappointing that city's efforts to rebrand themselves as the Britain's first green club - their commitment to recycling demonstrated in the continued employment of Paul Dickov who really ought to have been melted down for scrap by now - and Britain's first pink football club - feel free to insert your own Nicky Weaver joke here - are not paying off at the turnstile. The sad fact is that until they rebrand themselves as something other than the most turgid and unwatchable side in Britain, the seats are likely to remain unoccupied. Until we turn up to win the league in May that is.

Needless to say the quality of football on display was utterly abysmal and, like most games involving city, stands as a useful corrective to anyone still inclined to recycle the clapped out idea that 'The Premiership is the best league in the world'. That said, in comparison to city's recent stodge-fest against Newcastle, the Watford game was as incandescently brilliant as West Germany V Italy in the summer.

So the form book - that handy rhetorical invention - suggests that annihalation is on the cards. So why do I feel ever so slightly jittery? Why have recent derbies been such frustrating affairs? Why do I have this fear that they'll be cavorting as they grab a point and celebrate like they've just heard it's two for one on stonewashed jeans at Matalan? Why do I have this dread that Alex will start with Kieran Richardson on the wing?

Here's hoping that my foreboding feelings are as misplaced as a Kieran Richardson pass and that come tomorrow afternoon it's a celebratory swig of mulled wine on Albert Square, and tears falling into taches the length and breadth of Stockport.

Stop, thief!

2006-12-07T18:18:00.000+01:00

Ethical dilemmas of our time, Part 212. It's the Everton game last week and I arrive, as is my usual custom, about 45 minutes before kick-off, giving me ample time get a coffee and to buy and read a programme. At this point of course I must offer some kind of flimsy apology for the fact that both of these purchases stick more revenue in the Glazer coffers. Eighteen months ago, when an air of militancy still buzzed around Old Trafford, the idea was that those of us who were opposed to the Glazer coup but were unable to sever our connection to M16 and up sticks to FC would boycott anything that wasn't a match ticket. Indeed there was much heady talk of barricading concessions, stopping anyone handing over cash to the midget. How long ago and quaint it all seems now. So please accept this admission of how morally compromised I am and move on.

Anyway, I've got my programme and order a coffee. Being super-efficient and always eager to please I tender exactly the right money. And this is where the ethical dilemma bit kicks in. The bloke behind the counter, decides that, seeing as I gave the right amount, he might as well save himself a few seconds and not bother running it through the till. Indeed, he might as well go a bit further and not bother opening the till, and just nurses it in his hand, from where I'm pretty sure it was quickly transferred to his trouser pocket.

Now I could be wrong here. Indeed I could be unfairly maligning a soul of unblemished virtue. it's equally possible that United may have some kind of stringent and highly invasive policy of checking the pockets of all staff just on the off chance anyone does try to siphon a bit of the revenue stream off for themselves. But I reckon the guy just saw the chance to pocket £1.50 and took it.

So should I applaud this act or decry it? Was he stealing from me or was he stealing from Malcolm Glazer? No doubt he receives an obscenely small amount for his labours and I really shouldn't resent him topping up his pittance. But couldn't he have at least gone halves with me so I could join in the feeling of getting one over on Malc, even if it was only to the tune of such a meagre amount?

When the KGB come knocking...

2006-11-25T17:23:00.000+01:00

Phone set to vibrate?

With the news awash with dark rumours of KGB misbehaviour could there be a more appropriate time to face Abramovich's band of mercenaries? Have they got any of that radioactive stuff spare knocking about that they can pipe into the Chelsea boardoom/dressingroom? Apparently it's so material so toxic that they can't even do an autopsy for fear it will be fatal for the doctors. Fittingly the last thing i read about that was so ferociously toxic people were warned to stay well away was Ashley 'They are taking the piss Jonathon' Cole's self-serving whine of an autobiography.

Tomorrow will be Ashley's first visit to Old Trafford since he was freed from the yoke of slavery and the indignity of having to ply his trade for the insulting sum of £55K per week. Perhaps as part of their pre-match build up Sky will show a compilation of his finest moments set to the sound of Rufus Wainwright's 'Vibrate'. Or maybe not. If they did it's a safe bet that his first visit to OT, the infamous, Dwight Yorke inspired 6-1 mauling would not feature. Cole was substituted at half-time that day and i like to picture him in the dressing room,a quivering shell of a man. Let's hope for similar tomorrow.

In a game that has room for such outstanding examples of vile unpleasantness as Craig Bellamy and Joey Barton amongst others, it's actually quite an achievement to be the absolute vilest. Cole is the embodiment of all the ugly greed and twisted narcissism that pollutes the game, and his arrival at Chelsea was absolutely fitting. Not that i fool myself into thinking that United players are models of altruism and humility, especially not when we count the self-styled 'Most talked about footballer of his generation' among the personnel, but the sight of Cole mouthing off at refs for some perceived injustice is enough to induce boiling rage and almost makes me hate him more than i hate Kenyon and Mourinho combined. Some feat.

Kenyon has this week aired the opinion that Chelsea will be bigger than United by 2014. This, of course, is palpable bollocks. Chelsea will always exist in our slipstream, no matter how many trophies they shop, whine and dive themselves to. Whatever the outcome tomorrow, that will remain a fact.

2006-11-24T18:48:00.000+01:00

George...Simply the Best

Possibly the finest Oasis video never actually made.

Football, bloody hell

2006-11-21T23:24:00.000+01:00

This particular red didn't follow, follow, follow all the way to Glasgow, nor did I try to compensate by at least being in the required state of being pissed out of my head, so insetad I had to put up with Clive Tyldsley's laughably biased commentary. We were promised a cauldron of noise, a sonic inferno that would reduce the entire United team to quivering lumps of jelly before they'd so much as kicked a ball. Well apparently, Tyldsley was the only one who heard any such thing, judging at least by the way he eulogised the Celtic support even while the only audible crowd noise was the mocking cry of, 'Where's your famous atmosphere ?' from the assembled reds.

As for the game, injustice barely does it merit. Of course we've only got ourselves to blame and those of a recriminatory bent will already be frothing about Copenhagen and the stupidity of resting key players. But, penalty aside, Saha did some wonderful stuff tonight, twisting away from defenders with a range of flicks and shimmies that was frankly brilliant. Wayne was relatively quiet but Ronnie was scorching. Assuming business is done against Benfica the only lingering regret is that the opportunity to put Celtic in their place and underline the gulf in class between us and them was fluffed, and that's what rankles more than anything.

Anyway, 39 quid was automatically deducted from my bank account for what threatened to be an exercise in futility in a fortnight, so at least we're getting a game worth seeing now. And if nothing else we'll go into the Chelsea game simmering with intent and shimmering with brilliance.

Argentina! (Slightly duff return)

2006-11-05T15:21:00.000+01:00

I need to choose my words pretty carefully here. What I’m about to say verges on the mutinous and, in some circles is tantamount to heresy. I could well be guaranteeing myself immediate expulsion from the confederacy of right-thinking reds for merely thinking this, never mind publicising it. In fact it would probably be more socially acceptable to mutter something along the lines of, ‘Actually I think the Glazer’s have been really good for United,’ or, ‘Don’t you think it’s about time we gave all this Scousers stuff a rest?’. But here goes nothing.

It was a notion that started to hatch during the World Cup. During the Sevilla friendly it developed from a small doubt to a nagging concern, and by the end of last Wednesday’s debacle in Denmark is was a throbbing worry. I don’t really know how to put this, but, is it just me or is Gabriel Heinze, well, a bit crap?

Two seasons ago, such a sentiment would have been unthinkable. Heinze burst into the United side, a blur of kamikaze tackles and gung-ho sprints down the wing. There were no such things as 50-50 balls as Heinze launched himself into the challenge; opposition players would visibly flinch as he hurled himself at their feet, and from the ensuing tangle of limbs he would invariably emerge with the ball, oblivious to the tattered remnants of the opposition that lay in his wake.

As he charged down field, the cry would ring out, ‘Argentina! Argentina!’ At once a celebration of Gabi’s gifts, and a bit of caustic provocation for the little Eng-er-lander’s in the oppositions support. He was a marvel to behold, from the way he sprinted to the left corner before kick-off to run through his repertoire of weird psyching-up rituals to the way he barged around the pitch for the entire game, no reputation a match for his outrageous self-belief; through to his passionate conviction that he was the wronged party in any set-to, even when he blatantly wasn't.

And then he went and got injured, forcing him to sit out virtually the entire of last season. Though his participation in the World Cup was thought to be in jeopardy, he took his place in that magnificent Argentina line-up, the team that, in their decimation of Serbia and Montenegro played scored one of the most sumptuous goals ever seen, and who will always be haunted by the knowledge that they should have won the World Cup.

But they didn’t, and during that ignominious exit, poor old Messi still on the bench, the victim of a tactical blunder to trump all tactical blunders, it was no surprise to see Heinze one of the main protagonists in the fisticuffs that followed, seemingly believing that throttling a couple of Germany players might convince people to reconsider the outcome of the game. But this time, his aggression looked petty and pointless, and did nothing to erase the fact that he had been found hopelessly out of position several times in the tournament.

And that’s been the story of his stuttering return to the United line-up. Where once he radiated absolute conviction that every ball would be pounced on and be made his own, now he just sends out jittery vibes; will he misjudge it? Will he simply tumble the opponent to the ground? Will he actually be in position or will he still be lumbering back from a fruitless expedition upfield?
Perhaps, given the serious nature of his injury, indeed rumours to the effect that he would never play again swirled in its wake, I’m being unduly harsh on a player who gives his full-blooded all to the red cause. I will of course be happy to have these words served back to me on a bed of humble pie if, in the fullness of time, the majesty of his early form in a red shirt returns. But something nags away at me, almost as if that season, when he was named Fans’ Player of The Year don’t forget, was some kind of mass delusion, and that he was never that great to begin with.

Now has anyone else noticed that Rooney’s been a bit off-colour recently..?

Peace In Our Time, La

2006-10-21T12:24:00.000+01:00

At lunchtime tomorrow hostilities will be resumed with our friends from down the M62. On the pitch the spotlight will no doubt fall on Gary Neville after his infamous skip down to the away end last season, an event that many of the Scouse fans there assembled found so traumatic they haven’t been able to work since. Off the pitch we can expect levels of rancour to be cranked to ludicrous heights. Venom and vitriol will spill from every stand on to the heads of the Liverpool fans, much in the way more liquid and material forms of filth were deposited on the United end at Anfield last season.

A couple of years ago Greater Manchester Police deemed this fixture so innocuous that it was allowed to be played at 3:00pm on a Saturday. I recall a torpid game – Murphy’s spot-kick deciding matters - with an atmosphere to match. How far away that seems now. Just why has the degree of enmity raised to such a pitch that some last season were speculating that it wouldn’t be too long before the fixture claimed its first fatality and needed to be played out behind closed doors? It can’t all be Gary Nev’s fault. In fact I think we can trace it back to that dark night in Istanbul.

I remember the warm glow of satisfaction I felt at half-time. Having fluked their way to the semi and meeting the most supine Juventus side in history, Liverpool were finally, magnificently, being shown just how out of their depth they really were. 2-0 already, though it could easily have been more, visions of utterly humiliating scorelines danced before my eyes. I couldn’t wait for the second half to begin. And then the world turned upside down, and it soon became clear that this was going to be a bleak night for United fans.

The following season as they hymned their glorious triumph, our travails on and off the pitch left us nothing, bar references to a treble that had never felt more distant, to hit back with. The only way was down. And so it proved. Old wounds were ripped open and salt liberally inserted. Heysel. Hillsborough. I half expect to hear the old one about ‘Bill Shankly lying on his back’ to be exhumed tomorrow. With perfect timing Michael Shields has been back in the news this week as he’s coming home to see out his sentence. We can expect our finest songsmiths to be furiously composing a couplet to mark the occasion as I write.

Last season a Liverpool supporting work colleague asked me, genuinely baffled, why United fans were lowing ‘Murderers’ at her and her 6 year old daughter. ‘Heysel,’ I mumbled, half embarrassed, half apologetic. ‘But that was years ago,’ she challenged and, aware of the fact that all efforts to claim the moral high ground were doomed to fail, I could offer very little by way of comeback. ‘And why do you sing it when you’re not even playing us?’

It has to be said, she had a point there. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve felt embarrassed about the fact that United fans can think of no better way to get behind the team than sing ‘Without killing anyone…we’ve won it 2 times.’ With such a wide repertoire of songs, isn’t it slightly odd that we should resort to singing about Liverpool quite so often? Just like all those ABU sides used to be when they sang about us so much, we’re becoming defined by the thing we hate more than the thing we love.
The Leeds obsession’s equally bizarre. Leeds United are little more than a flea living on United, an irritant that we bark at and scratch, but that essentially wouldn’t actually exist without us. Apparently Leeds still do play football games and sack their manager every now and again, but if we didn’t sing about them every bloody week they would simply fade into obsolescence. But we just can’t help ourselves.

Even at FC United where, on my infrequent visits, I’m forced to marvel at the inspired nature of the songs, you still hear Michael Sheilds song get too many an airing. Is it, and I’m loath to write this, that too many United fans are basically stupid? I’ll defy any sentient human being to watch JimmyMcGovern’s film about Hillsborough and then sing ’96 is not enough,’ which can only lead me to conclude that the ignorant and stupid are starting to outnumber the rest amongst United’s support.

In this morning’s paper – The Guardian in my case, as if that wasn’t obvious from the sentiments above – Ferguson is appealing for both sets of supporters to show respect for each other tomorrow. I expect his request to seem fairly forlorn by ten past one tomorrow. So let’s change the record and remember, ‘Without singing about nothing but Liverpool, we won it two times…’

Argentina!

2006-09-01T09:38:00.000+01:00

For generations it will no doubt be filed alongside those other seismic events that sent a shudder rippling across the globe; the shooting of JFK, the death of Diana, the disappointment of learning Malcolm Glazer had survived both his strokes. Yes, for years people will ask, ‘Where were you when you heard that Tevez and Mascherano had signed for West Ham?’ And most of us will answer in one of two ways, either sat in front of Sky Sports News, or sneaking a look at the Internet at work. Both sources of information share a common feature – inflating the trivial to a wildly disproportionate and hysterical sense of importance.

In recent weeks the Red Issue forum – the burning hub of red related idiocy on the Internet – has hummed with anxiety as United have allowed players of such proven quality as Dirk Kuyt and David James to slip through their fingers. The signing of virtually every player by any other club has been immediately followed by some forumista or another wailing at United’s failure to hijack the deal and bag the player themselves. As the transfer deadline approached this frenzied fretting intensified to an almost ridiculous pitch. You could almost hear the heads being bashed against monitor and keyboard in despair. This in spite of the fact that United have got off to a blazing start to the season and are sitting pretty at the top of the league, after all for the paranoia riddled individuals who inhabit the forum, that’s just what they want you to think.

So you can imaging the reaction when news of West Ham’s ‘sensational double transfer coup’ broke (it’s hard not to fall into tabloid cliché when discussing this kind of stuff). Predictably they wailed like never before. When this was quickly followed by the news that Rossi was being packed off to the toon on loan, the sobs were deafening. Rossi, of course, having been anointed as some kind of saviour on paltry evidence indeed if you ask me, much in the way that Alan Smith has.

But the sense of dismay at the West Ham deals reached critical level. Conspiracy theorists quickly went into action – what was I saying about paranoia? – joining the dots between Corinithians, Media Sports Investments, Abramaovich and Chelsea. The feeling that Tevez and Mascherano are rightfully ‘ours’ was palpable. After all aren’t we the ones who travel up and down the country goading opposition supporters with shouts of ‘Argentina?’ Mancunia is virtually twinned with Buenos Aries these days.

But no, they’ll be sporting the claret and blue, at least for a couple of months, and United must soldier on with a threadbare squad that only contains the single greatest football talent on the planet (Wayne Rooney not Darren Fletcher), two incomparably great veteran midfielders, and a wealth of top-class defenders. January can’t come a moment too soon.

The New Aston Villa?

2006-08-31T08:22:00.000+01:00

We’re so used to hearing players in pre-season repeat the mantra about needing to get off a to a flyer that actually seeing them follow through on their words comes as quite a shock. So we’d be forgiven for getting a little giddy and carried away, after all we’ve played football of a pretty intoxicating kind, particularly the vintage uncorked by Ryan Giggs. But looking around at the company we’re keeping at the top of the table my doubts are starting to surface once again. Indeed I’m starting to think that United’s slide from pre-eminence has been even more precipitous than first feared. Take a look at our fellow early pace-setters, Aston Villa, Everton and Portsmouth. Exactly the kind of perennial mid-table also rans that you would never dream of lumping United with. The kind of teams who get a couple of lucky-breaks in August and early September and their fans inundate phone-ins with rash claims about ‘this being their year’. By November they’ve inevitably slid back into the state of anonymous mediocrity that they’re used to and memories of ‘this being their year’ evaporate in double-quick time as they fight to stave off relegation.

Is this what its come to for United as well? Is our virtually immaculate start to the season merely a red herring, the gods of football once again teasing us by dangling something shiny and wonderful in our faces then thwarting us when we reach out to grab it? (And don’t think the gods aren’t toying with us; did you see the Cup Final two years ago? Did you see the way we got close to Chelsea last year only to be trounced at their place and a final twist of the knife coming in Rooney’s injury? Oh they’ve got it in for us alright).

Is this their greatest insult yet? To find ourselves in such proximity to the Premiership’s legion of mediocrities. In fact I’d feel less nervous if Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal weren’t all wobbling away around mid-table, but were squatting directly behind us. Maybe I should be reassured by the style of the football we’re playing and by the way that we’ve calmly swerved around the latest obstacle that those pesky gods have hurled in our path, namely the unjust bans for Rooney and Scholes. These gods clearly have their emissaries on earth, vessels through which they will wage war on Manchester United Football Club. Brian Barwick’s one, Peter Kenyon another. Having tried his best to destroy us from within, Kenyon is now trying the from without method. Both will fail. ‘We’ll never die’ is more than a mere song, after all.

Sometimes I really wish I could just enjoy football. But then that's not the point, is it?

Ole, Ole, Ole!

2006-08-24T08:44:00.000+01:00

At approximately 9:50 pm last night (Wed 23/8) strange phenomena were reported across the globe. In Lebanon and Israel soldiers from Hizbullah and Israel looked sadly towards their weapons and were overwhelmed with feelings of pity for all that has passed over the preceding weeks. As one, they resolved to make the cease-fire work. In Baghdad, a man about to strap himself with explosives and drive towards an allied forces checkpoint, paused and decided that today wasn’t a day for self-immolation. In Florida, doctors raced to the bedside of an ageing businessman as a massive stroke jolted his body. In South Manchester, a telephone rang. John Squire, former guitarist of the Stone Roses, answered and heard his erstwhile partner Ian Brown wondering if he was doing anything in the morning and if he fancied getting together for a bit of a jam. In Liverpool, people carried on robbing and murdering, but there’s no helping Scouser is there?

Cosmic harmonies drifted towards planet earth, sounding not unlike one of the extra tracks on the reissue of the Beach Boys ‘Pet Sounds’. All was well with the world.

And the reason for this sudden outbreak of interplanetary good vibrations? Ole Gunnar Solskjaer had just planted the ball in the Charlton net. After two years in the purgatory of the treatment room, Ole was back doing what Ole does best; rising from the bench and spreading a smile of joy around the world.

So, maybe I exaggerate a little, after all it’s doubtful anything could restore Squire and Brown to friendship, but the sense of contentment experienced as Ole scored, particularly as it was closely followed by the news percolating in from Teeside that Chelsea had lost, was hard to beat.

It’s been an unexpectedly good start to the season all round. Who would have predicted that I would glide out of Old Trafford on Sunday hailing Patrice Evra as possibly United’s Man of the Match? (Rooney apart that is. Rooney always being a class apart, and a separate category of ‘Man of the Match Who Isn’t Wayne Rooney’ needing devising).

Just as surprising was the fact that Fletcher didn’t just lash in a splendid goal last night, but that he dominated the midfield with a combination of strength and skill. Not to mention that Saha is making a mockery of jibes about the fact he’s manufactured entirely from balsa wood.

Chuck into the mix the currently imperious form of Ryan Giggs and even Rio Ferdinand and you wonder why we spent most of the summer months fretting about our limp performance in the transfer market. So you start urging caution on yourself, pleading not to get carried away too soon, bracing yourself for the inevitable crash. But for now, caution can do one. United are top of the league and if you listen carefully you’ll even hear the planets singing ‘Take me home United Road.’