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Manchester United Fans – A Welcome Reality Check

10 years ago
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Did you see the Manchester United fans as cameras panned around OT on Saturday with 10 minutes or so left?

Did you see the looks on faces that haven’t been seen for 20 years on some of them, never on the younger ones? The look of apprehension. The look of trepidation. The look of uncertainty. The look of ‘Bloody hell, we’re a bit s**t’!

People who for decades have sat contentedly as the goals and trophies piled up, people who occasionally tolerated an away goal, or, in extreme circumstances, a goal from a penalty.

Now they have fear in their eyes, now they check their watches, not so as they aren’t late for the flight back to Kuala Lumpur or Copenhagen as was the norm, but wondering if they can snatch a draw.

Remember when they used to patronise phone-ins with their, “You have to stick by your manager, changing doesn’t help”? Now they’re calling for Moyes’s head after a dozen or so games, ‘Bring back Fergie’ is the worried cry.

Now they’re finding out what It’s like to be us. Checking the league table, not to see if they can win the League by February this year, for a bit of fun, but to see how Swansea got on.

Streaming out of the ground with stunned looks, disbelief, this can’t be happening. A quick final dash into the club shop for their ‘Moyes out’! t-shirts and comedy Rooney hair pieces, before the bus back to Exeter or Sidcup. At least these people bother to go.

How many times have you been in a pub in the UK when one of their matches is on? There they are, the plastic Mancs, the glory hunters, couldn’t find OT with an Indian tracker and GPS, but they sit there, in their Cantona shirts, ‘bigging it up’ about ‘the lads’. Support passed down from a Dad who revelled in picking a winning team and also because he loved the way George Best popped Miss World every year.

There is joy to be had in football at times (even when you realise that you’re merely a money making conduit for a purposeless owner) and we should celebrate that.

Yes, this is a bit childish, but just remember how many times you’ve schlepped to some cr*ppy outpost of the UK, watching another Toon horror show, slunk into your local boozer just before closing time to be met by the resident plastic Manc jeering, “The lads won again today, how did your lot get on”?

Revel in it folks, chances like this don’t come along very often, a bit like away penalties at OT in fact.

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