Confessions of a Moderate Fanatic

Why do I still hope that Manchester United will win?

On Saturday afternoon, if I catch the final scores, why do I still feel a pang of disappointment if it`s just a draw, or even worse a loss. And why do I then look at the tables to see where they are?

Of course it`s not always Saturdays these days. Sundays, even Mondays. The influence of SKY.

A far cry from the days when I was taken to Old Trafford, in the late fifties, when every game started at 3pm, when the pubs closed.

Saturday morning work shift. Pub. Game. Pub. That`s how it was up and down the land.

But why do I still care?

Is it just a tribal loyalty? Like being once a catholic? Something you can never quite shake off?

I don`t recognise any of the players these days – other than Rooney, and he`s a scouser for heaven`s sake. And the thing I wonder is if any of these highly paid players with their exotic foreign names know anything about the club they play for any more than I know about them.

Is it the tragic romance of Munich that still has me hooked?

The programme for the next game after Munich had a blank team-sheet. To be announced. That programme can still make me cry.

The Babes. Lost.

Though through some magic they still made it to the Cup Final that year. 1958. Three months after the air-crash.

They played Bolton. Nat Lofthouse, the Bolton centre forward, shoulder charged Harry Gregg and knocked him out. The ball fell out of his arms into the net. A travesty. They called Nat Lofthouse `The Lion of Vienna` after an international game there. The Lion of Vienna! No greater lion than Harry Gregg. At Munich, amidst the chaos and the snow he went back into the burning plane and rescued a mother and child who were trapped. The humble Irishman, too embarrassed to acknowledge his own bravery, even when they met again, 50 years later.

Don`t talk to me about the Lion of Vienna.

In the cemetery at Weaste, in Salford, just by the ship canal, and in sight of Old Trafford, is the grave of Eddie Colman. Like most of the Babes, he was a local lad, but with magic in his feet. He probably earned little more than his mates who went to be welders or bricklayers but he was there in the blood red shirt on Saturdays, with seventy thousand watching. And there, on the stone, is recorded the stunned loss of his mother and father burying their son at twenty one. There were trophies there at first, and caps, and a sculpted football, but they all disappeared over time or were vandalised. If you go there now you see that they both joined him there, eventually, his mum and dad.

And there was Bobby Charlton, so shaken that he almost never played football again, before emerging into the bright sunlit sixties, the prince of footballers.

Now, don`t get me going about Denis Law or Georgie Best. That wasn`t tribal loyalty that was just ... something else.

In the 1968 European cup final – everyone wanted us to win. Even Eusebio, on the other side, Benfica – I think even he wanted us to win. Bobby Charlton, who had cried after the 1966 world cup and Nobby Stiles who had done his toothless dance, were strangely mute. It was all about Sir Matt Busby and the boys dead at Munich.

Fate.

A prophecy fulfilled.

Well, I can`t finish without according Ferguson the praise he deserves, though when he sold Beckham, it finally dawned on me that football was just a business. Would Sir Matt ever have sold Georgie Best? Would he have sold his own son or daughter? Not in a million years.

Though let`s not forget the others of the 94 class. Butt, Neville [G], Neville [P], the incomparable Paul Scholes, the even more incomparable Ryan Giggs.

Hardly a Manchester lad gets a look in these days.

So why do I care?

But still, begrudgingly, on Saturday afternoon [or Sunday, or Monday] I switch the TV on for five minutes to see how we`ve done. Then when the ritual is over, I can let it go again.

And there it is. Like an atheist going to Mass. I don`t believe and I know I`m a hypocrite, but somehow, and without shame, I have this sneaky weasel sense of having both options covered.