Colin Sheridan: History keeps the red flag flying for Man Utd
Manchester United fans celebrate during the Emirates FA Cup Quarter Final against Liverpool. Pic: Michael Regan/Getty Images
What do you tell a kid nowadays when they ask you what football team they should support? There was a time when such things were more binary, less muddled by financial fair play and the human rights abuses of nation states that may own your football club. Back in the day it was often as simple as picking the team in red or the team in white. An Irish player excelling at a club, sealing your vote. One, glorious European night caught on television. An emigrant uncle, returning with a match programme from a midlands town. Often, you’d follow the preferences of an older sibling or a parent. It was less of a choice, more an accident. A consequence of circumstance.
My son recently “chose” Manchester United. I winced as he made his declaration, which, to his credit, only came about after weeks of rumination. Honestly, I was proud of how discerning he turned out to be. He canvassed a lot of people - classmates, cousins, village elders - and spent a lot of time examining league tables and form guides. He also started reading Matt and Tom Oldfield’s Ultimate Football Heroes series of books, each one profiling a player from childhood to superstardom. While I was initially annoyed at the indifference he showed the Karl Ove Knausgård hexalogy I got him for his communion, I parked my snobbery, resolving that reading is reading, and so long as he had a book in front of him, it didn't matter that it was the eating habits of Bruno Fernandes he was learning about instead of crying over the banality and humiliations of a life lived in a Norwegian fishing village. Following Manchester United will bestow enough existential dread upon him, anyway, so skipping Knausgaard was a wise move.
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