FC United show true heart of Manchester

HOW did we do last night, then? Not that it matters very much, I suppose: thanks to the rather fortunate win in Catalonia, this group appears to have gone into a coma, which prompted Messrs Fergie and Carrick pre-match to sound off about how “great” the Champions League still is in terms of excitement in its group stages.

Mmm. I bet you could hardly sleep on Monday night, such were your levels of anticipation.

So the biggest Manchester football match this week clearly wasn’t last night, nor will it be the visit of Wolves on Saturday. In fact, it will take place on Friday night in that most unlikely of environs – Rochdale, who take on FC United in the first round proper of the FA Cup. You can easily get hold of a ticket for MUFC v Wolves, but it’s already at the sell-your-sister’s-virginity stage for this Titanic encounter.

Five and a half years ago, FCUM was still nothing but a drunken promise made amongst a dozen anti-Glazer Reds in a Rusholme curry house.

Now look at it – multiple promotions and non-league Cup wins later, bolstered by the most vociferous support outside the top two football league divisions, and building up a fund to build a new stadium near the birthplace of Manchester United – Ten Acres Lane in Newton Heath – to which Friday’s 70K-plus media fees will be added.

And they say the romance of the FA Cup is dead? Think on.

Rochdale are odds-on favourites to win, of course, being several pyramid tiers above FC, but it’ll still be a historic moment – more so, one suspects, than the protest march at Old Trafford will prove to be in posterity’s account books. The MUFC anti-Glazerites, who decided to stay in or around OT rather than decamp to Gigg Lane with The Rebels, have been riddled by divisions, and disputes over direction, ever since 2005, and one feared that the moment of maximum opportunity last spring had already been and gone in a flurry of green ‘n gold.

Saturday did at least show they could still turn out a few thousand to march together, and hurl the odd bottle at a Megastore shutter, but the ground was still full, United won, and the Glazers will continue to sleep soundly upon their beds of siphoned money in Florida. You can salute the bravery and effort of the lads involved, who are risking arrest and injury every time they set out on such endeavours, but you still have to point out that unless the actions escalate – and also eventually hit Glazer income streams – then it’s a bit of a cul-de-sac in the greater scheme of things.

Rather more hopeless, however, is the fervent wish of many that Nani would stop cheating. I am not referring to his behaviour in knocking in last Saturday’s winner, which was entirely justified and correct, but the blatant dive he took moments beforehand after the ref had failed to blow for a minor tug on his jersey.

It is one of those dividing lines amongst fans, though: for every relative old-timer such as me who rails against this, there’s another who, to quote one typical regular on Red Issue’s website, will shrug and declare: “he may be a **** but at least he’s OUR ****.”

I don’t know for sure if it’s a fact that these kinds of attitudes amongst fans have increased with each new intake since 1993, but I suspect it is indeed a generational and cultural shift related to the new world of Premiership-darwinism. Perhaps that’d partly explain why 72 of the 75,000 at OT chose not to bother with the protest march too? For evolution appears to have bred a horde of narrow-eyed, result-fixated, ruthless triumphalists who feed on silverware rather than true glory.

* Richard Kurt