Local pride stirred as back street kid Welbeck fronts up
He was at it again after the Emirates setback last week, and he succeeded in convincing just as many people with his argument as ever — zero.
Nevertheless, we enjoy these outbursts of unjustified paranoia all the same, as it proves there’s life left in the old dog yet. When he stops complaining, it’ll mean he’s stopped caring, and it’ll be time to cart him off to the retirement kennel. (Where, perhaps, fixture list complaints will be superseded by Grandpa Simpson-esque moans that ‘the nurses are doctoring my betting slips’ and so forth).
One couldn’t help but notice, however, that he didn’t complain about the Soho Square’s computer choice for his next match after the Emirates toughie: Stoke at home is just about the banker of the season, and the visitors were a spectacular 18/1 against at Ladbrokes. Now sometimes when the bookies go for such ostentatious beyond-probability odds-setting, they do come a satisfying cropper. I recall Portsmouth being 12-1 against in our spring cup tie— they’d reckoned without Fergie dusting off his tinker-machine kaleidoscope, and several canny punters duly cashed in.
But on Saturday, it soon transpired these were accurate odds: still, credit us for excitingly squeezing out every possible drop of blood in poor Stoke’s body, rather than knocking off early at two or three-nil as would once have been our wont.
Younger Reds will never have known Stoke as being anything other than minnows; nothing to get excited or concerned about. We oldies, however, can recall an extremely handy Stoke outfit of the 70s.
Indeed, one of my most vivid early memories at Old Trafford is of us nervously welcoming them one April night during the frenzied ‘76 title run-in, when Jimmy Greenhoff broke our hearts with the visitors’ winner. (A strike duly noted by Tommy Docherty, who swooped for Jimmy months later).
That Stoke team had actually won a trophy more recently than we had — 1972’s epic League Cup — and their canny, experienced warriors made us look still a bit too young and callow that night.
Not an eventuality you could ever conceive happening again to MUFC, I dare say, as you look around a team stuffed with early-maturing and mainly bought-in, pre-established mega-talent. And if one is being picky, one might sigh a little for what would appear to a case of mourning Yesterday’s Men. It seems unlikely that we are going to see anytime soon a repeat of the freakshows of 1954-56, 1974-6 and 1994-6 when Old Trafford’s first teams ran sweet with juicy, and often local, youth.
Arsenal’s frightening success with their kids in the League Cup has reminded us, too, that there’s no real excuse for this: United may bleat all they like about the artificial rules imposed by the FA on our Academy but it’s exactly the same boat in which Arsenal and our neighbours City have so clearly risen to the top deck.
That unfulfilled yearning — and I do accept that this is very Princess And The Pea, given the pitched riches on display every week — is the reason why many of us were so ecstatic to see young Welbeck’s extraordinary explosion on Saturday. Mancunian, 17-years-old, and burying a 25-yard smasher on his full home league debut: this is the stuff we were brought up on as Reds kids, the kind of moment when you grab that eight-year old son you’ve taken to the match and say ‘that could be you one day!’ (Before muttering to yourself that there’s probably no hope if he’s inherited his mother’s total lack of co-ordination and judgement).
After all, there’s nothing more elemental to any young male Mancunian than the dream, as you kick a casey around Stretford’s red-bricked back-streets, that you’ll play for your beloved local team. Which for we blessed ones is United. Best of luck, kiddo.
* Richard Kurt, whose Red Army Years is available via redissuebooks@hotmail.co.uk
