Hush
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
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
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.
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.
