“We’ve made the boy an offer and he’s turned it down,” said Ferguson. “It’s his decision. He can please himself – there are no more talks planned that I’m aware of. If he wants to stay we would love that. But if he wants to look elsewhere that’s up to him – there’s nothing you can do with modern-day footballers. He has changed his agent – I don’t know why. He’s got an agent that has given him advice that I do not understand. I think the problem is with the agent, not the player.”

The following month a deal was agreed and the manager was delighted, claiming he “couldn’t bare to lose him.” Maybe both sides were prepared to give a little and the situation was resolved. However, when the next extension came to be discussed, history repeated itself. Midway through the 2007-2008 season, the club were offering him just £45,000 a week on a new deal. He wanted £55,000 a week.

To give some context, in 2003, John O’Shea was offered a contract of around £35,000. “The one thing I don’t want is for people to say I can play anywhere,” said a 22-year-old O’Shea. “It’s fine for this season because it’s done me the world of good but over time I want to stay in one position.”

Four years later and O’Shea had failed to nail down a place in the starting XI but certainly was a very useful utility player. He was rewarded with a contract worth around £50,000 a week.

Back to 07-08, Gary Neville was out for the season meaning Wes was our first choice right back and with 52 appearances, played more games for us than any other player. When you consider this was the season we won the Double (with Wes missing just two league games all season and supplying the assist for our only goal in the European Cup final) it added further weight to his argument that he should be rewarded for his importance to the team. Yet the club still tried to take the piss out of him. Why? Because they thought they could.

“Players of today live in their agents’ pockets,” Ferguson said two months before Wes eventually signed. “It’s a situation which depresses me at times, it really depresses me. Wes has been with us since he was 13, but I don’t think that matters these days. Players’ agents live their lives for them and if you are happy to go along with that, you get the situation you have got just now. But Wes knows this and the other players have told him. We wouldn’t have made the offer if we hadn’t had faith in him. It’s in his hands. It’s amazing really given that he has had such a good season and has had such a good run of games while Gary has been injured.”

So, because Wes had been with the club since he was 13, he should settle for any old salary whilst lesser players earned more. O’Shea was megging Figo when he signed his first big deal in 2003, skipping out on the lesser contracts most players his age who have come through the ranks sign, the kind of contract Wes will have signed at that age. This meant by 2007 they had to bump it up even further, despite the fact O’Shea hadn’t fulfilled that early promise and was used as a utility player.

Then think about how much money Rio Ferdinand was earning every week when he was banned for eight months through his own stupidity, only to then take months agreeing a new and improved contract when he returned. There was no criticism of him by the manager though.

The fans booed Rio during the 2005 pre-season friendlies and rather than agreeing with us, claiming that he was in his agent’s pocket, Sir Alex defended him. “I’m not entirely happy with the reaction of the fans,” he said. “Players who go on the field and hear their own fans booing them is not encouraging at all.” David Gill and Carlos Queiroz offered similar statements of support, “You have to think about your worth,” Gill said. “I respect him for that.”

The foreign players or the bigger names we bring in are afforded time and support whilst ridiculous sums of money are put in front of them and rejected. But the local lads, who are offered lower salaries, are expected to sign. The club means so much more to them yet the club seems to punish them for that.

“I’m a Manchester lad and would love to play for United for the rest of my career,” said Brown in 2001.

“I’ve been here since I was 13 and don’t want to be anywhere else,” he said in 2004.

“I’m a Manchester lad and Old Trafford is still the only place for me,” he said in 2007. “I would love to see out my career at United. I’ve no intention of going elsewhere.”

“I would do anything for the club,” he said later that year. “It is certainly hard to imagine ever playing for anyone else. Hopefully that won’t happen. I am happy here and hopefully I can stay here.”

“To be part of a team I have supported all my life is a great honour,” he said in 2008.

He didn’t start talking to clubs behind our back, he didn’t show a lack of commitment on the pitch, he just asked to be paid what he felt he deserved and was demonised by the club for it.

Some players have a “loyalty” bonus in their contract, whereby if they don’t hand in a transfer request and don’t try and leave, they will be rewarded. What about the players who want to stay regardless? What about those who have always dreamed of playing for that club, give 100% every time they’re on the pitch and would do anything to stay forever? What is their reward? Just being offered a new contract at all, it would seem, regardless of whether it’s on a parity with those of a similar status who happen not to be local.

Danny Welbeck may be the latest player to receive the Wes Brown treatment after the club and player have failed to come to an agreement on salary. Whilst the manager insisted there were no problems last week, it is clear there is some disagreement behind the scenes. This isn’t an unusual situation where new contracts are concerned, with both sides keen to get the best deal, but I would like to see a resolution with allows Welbeck to feel valued.

It’s interesting to note that as a 5-year-old, Danny was playing football on the streets of Longsight with a 16-year-old United trainee. Who else? Wes Brown. On Markfield Avenue at No 42, with a red front door, lived the Browns. On the opposite side of the street were the Welbecks.

“We didn’t encourage it at first – we thought Danny could get hurt,” said Brown. “But the concern didn’t last long, to be honest. Once Danny got started, you could see he was decent. He had the skills and he could look after himself.”

Here are two Manchester lads, who will have worn their United shirts as they played on the fields, lifting their collar like Eric Cantona or trying to take players on like they were Ryan Giggs, who had achieved their dream.

“There is no better feeling for a Manc kid than scoring for United,” Welbeck said in August 2011.

“I’ve been in Manchester all my life and I’m a Manc through and through,” he said in April 2011.

“I suppose I’m just like any other normal Manc boy, really,” he said in September 2009. “To be given the chance to play for United is a dream.”

“Scoring in front of the Stretford End is what every young boy from Manchester dreams of,” he said in November 2008 after scoring on his debut. “I loved it. I’ve thought about it every day of my life ever since I started playing football.”

So, when you get a player who talks like this about the club, instead of rewarding them for that loyalty, it seems as though United are keener to take advantage of it.

Welbeck has reportedly been offered £45,000 a week but is holding out for £60,000. Danny’s agent is his cousin and will have probably taken note of the fact Chicharito has just signed a deal reportedly worth £80,000 a week. Of course, Hernandez had a blinding first season with the club, scoring 20 goals, but the new deal was as much about keeping Real Madrid at bay as it was rewarding the player. His agent had spoken to the Spanish club and there was no way United were willing to lose this gem of a player.

However, Welbeck is ahead of Chicharito in pecking order this season, scoring 9 goals in 21 games, a strike rate of 0.43 goals per game, which rivals the 0.44 goals per game from the Mexican last season. Why should Welbeck put pen to paper on a four or five year deal which sees him earn pretty much half as much as a player he is keeping out of the team?

This is not a matter of money, rather principle. Whether it was £45 a week or £45,000 a week, Welbeck should be offered a deal which is in keeping with his position in the squad and comparable with those around him. If the club want him to prove himself over the course of a season, as Chicharito did, then fair enough, they can open negotiations again in the summer. But Welbeck would then have just 12 months remaining on his current deal and nobody wants us to be in that situation.

I’m not one to pander to the precious culture we see from footballers today but then I also do not agree with the club taking advantage of our local players either. They shouldn’t be expected to be paid considerably less just because they’re desperate to play for United, that is backward. Instead, let’s celebrate the fact we have local lads in the team and see to it that they are duly rewarded. Fingers crossed it will all be sorted out soon and that Welbeck’s Manchester United career goes as well as we all want it to.

———-
After Wes rejection, will Rio receive special treatment?

Gone are the days when you could expect a fight, whether that be on the pitch or in the tunnel, with characters like Keane, Vieira, Ruud, Cole, Neville, Lauren etc. no longer proudly donning our shirts. Arsenal are more like Reyes than they are Vieira these days, namby pamby no marks who just don’t have the bottle for the title or success. Would the Arsenal of old have lost to Birmingham in the League Cup final? Would they fuck. I hated that team because they were as brilliant as they were egotistical and like United, had the determined spirit to go and get games won. They had bags full of confidence and self-belief which made them incredibly annoying and incredibly tricky to beat.

I look at United’s current squad and whilst in actual fact 2006-2007 was the last time we had amounted more points on 21 games than we have this season, we hardly have the players we used to who’d be up for a scrap or be capable of blowing every other team away to win the title. But however far away United are from their best ever squads, it’s nothing like the difference between this current Arsenal team and the one that went unbeaten. That doesn’t mean Sunday will be a walk in the park, obviously not, they do have players who can cause damage and a one off result means little. I’m sure no Arsenal fan would argue that Swansea, Fulham, Blackburn or Liverpool were better teams than them, even though all of them have got three points against them this season. But their fans do have to seriously contemplate the fact they probably won’t be playing any Champions League football next season, illustrating just how far their expectations have shifted.

Looking back, the 6-1 victory over Arsenal probably ranks as my favourite in recent years, with United going 16 points clear of them with three months of the season left to go back in 2001. The 3-1 victory over them in the Champions League semi-final was also great, with us ripping them apart and giving them a lesson on impressive attacking football.

However, when you think of great games between the two clubs it’s hard to look past that 4-2 at Highbury. Both clubs had been displaced from the top spot by Chelsea, who looked as though they were going to dominate English football indefinitely at the time, leaving us two to battle it out for 2nd place. This game though was like a film. In fact, if it was a film, you’d roll your eyes at the plot.

It started with our captain charging down the tunnel after Arsenal’s captain. At that point, nobody really knew what had gone on, although Roy was gibbering on about Gary Neville. “I’ll see you out there!” he said, pointing at Vieira over the referee’s shoulder. He meant business.

It was Vieira who struck first though, putting Arsenal 1-0 up with less than ten minutes played. Ryan Giggs levelled the score ten minutes later, only for Dennis Bergkamp to put them 2-1 up before half-time. After the restart, Cristiano Ronaldo, who was still referred to as a “one trick pony” back then, scored two goals in four minutes and we were ahead. He held his finger to his lips, incensing the home crowd, and United looked good for the points. Then, with 20 minutes to go, Mikael Silvestre only went and bloody headbutted Freddie Ljungberg! “I have seen it but I can’t believe it,” said Ferguson after the game. “Mikael has such an impeccable disciplinary record.” That was the first and last red card of his career, and what a way to get it.

United replaced Ronaldo with Brown, Giggs with Saha, and looked to cling on to the 3 points with ten men for twenty minutes away from home. A draw wouldn’t have been the end of the world but if Arsenal equalised quickly, we would have then been left fighting not to lose.

Then, without warning, something magical happened. It wasn’t Henry or Rooney, it wasn’t Bergkamp or Scholes, it was John O’Shea. Yes, there he was, shock all across his face, eyes out on stalks, after putting away the most delightful chip to secure our 4-2 win. God bless him.

Beating them 8-2 this season felt a fraction as good as that result in 2005 did. I was laughing by the end of that game, thoroughly enjoying the pain they must be feeling as yet another goal was scored, but the rivalry between the clubs is nothing like it was. Beating Arsenal 8-2 was better than doing the same to Bolton but there is nothing like the intensity of feelings between the clubs now. I hated that Arsenal team. Pires, Henry, Bergkamp, Ljunberg, Cole, Lauren, Campbell, Lehmann, Keown, Reyes, Vieira… I hated them. Now? I’m fairly indifferent. Wilshere is a bit of a cock, Van Persie can punish you, but I’m not going to get too worked up about any of their players and that’s why the 8-2 didn’t feel like it would have a few years ago.

So, just as you start to prepare for another less than special “clash” between the two clubs, Henry signs for them again! What a fantastic way to add a bit of spice to the occasion. He scored 8 goals in 14 league games against us during his first stint at Arsenal, some of those incredibly painful to even think about, let alone watch again. Remember that ridiculous goal he scored against us in 2000 from outside the box, flicking the ball up with his first touch then lobbing the keeper with his second? Or that injury time winner in 2007 after we had been winning the game with ten minutes to go? Agony.

I hated Henry whilst he was at Arsenal but he’s managed to intensify that feeling since he left.

“At one point it crossed my mind to leave,” he said in the summer of 2006. “But I think with my heart and my heart told me to stay. I’ve never played in Spain and never will. This is my last contract.”

The following summer he was parading around the Nou Camp in a Barcelona shirt. “It has been a long chase but I’m finally here and happy to be here and I can’t wait to go out there and show what I can do,” he said. “It is incredible. I am looking forward to playing in the Camp Nou and helping the team in every way I can. Barcelona are a wonderful club steeped in tradition and play beautiful football. I’m sure I will be very happy here.”

He has of course reverted to the sentiments of his 2006 statement now though, claiming to have the club in his heart, being a fan, loving Arsenal etc. Like Cantona, Solskjaer, Giggs, Scholes, Neville, to name a few, Henry had the option of seeing out his career at Arsenal. He chose not to do that though, he chose to leave, yet whenever he’s given the opportunity, bleats on about his bond with Arsenal. What a load of bollocks. They give him an awful statue to celebrate the eight seasons and two league titles he won, he has a little cry about it, and here he is, back playing for the club he “supports”.

No need to feel indifferent about Sunday any more though because now you get to eagerly await one of our lads putting in a crunching tackle or Henry miskicking the ball and putting it out for a throw. You also get to feel sick in your stomach every time he gets on the ball in the box, dreading the thought of him sticking it in our net just one last time.

So, welcome back Henry, you twat, I’ve really missed hating you.

2006/2007 turned out to be a brilliant season for United though, with us winning the league, reaching the Champions League semi-finals and FA Cup final. It wasn’t just our success of that season though, winning our first title since 2003, but the individual moments and games along the way. What a season.

Ole Gunnar Solskjaer

In Solskjaer’s second game of the 2006/2007 season, he scored an injury time goal against Charlton. He had played in just three league games the season before, one in December, one in April and one in May. He didn’t play at all during the season before that. Time and again it looked as though his playing career was over, yet here he was scoring goals for us again.

His best moment of the same came against Aston Villa in the Cup. After we took the lead, they pulled a goal back with 15 minutes to go. With a replay hanging over us, up popped Solskjaer to score the winner in injury time.

He went on to score 11 goals for us that season, playing in 32 games, scoring in the league, the Champions League, the FA Cup and the League Cup. We’d loved Solskjaer for years but after having to contemplate the strong possibility we had seen him play for us for the last time, we appreciated him all the more that season. It was brilliant to have him back.

O’Shea’s winner at Anfield

We had been up against it at Anfield and following Wayne Rooney’s substitution with injury and Paul Scholes’ sending off, we were probably happy to settle for a point.

Cristiano Ronaldo got in a powerful freekick which Pepe Reina couldn’t hold on to, so John O’Shea, of all people, slotted it in to the roof of the net. It’s that look of surprise and disbelief on his face, the expression we often saw after an O’Shea goal, which gets me every time. I also like that as he runs towards the away fans he looks over his right shoulder, only to find no one there, so settles for Rio Ferdinand on his left.

The celebrations that came at the final whistle were amazing. Not just an injury time winner in front of the Kop, but a goal that made us really start to believe we were going to win the title again, our first in four years.

“I would have trouble explaining how we lost that in Spanish,” said Benitez after the final whistle. “In English I find it almost impossible.”

Beating the Italians

Having struggled to leave our mark on Europe since the 1999 Champions League win, I wasn’t too ambitious over our chances this season. We didn’t even make it out of the group the season before so when we lost 2-1 against Roma in the quarter-finals first leg I was fairly happy with the result. I was desperate for us to get that away goal to put us in a stronger position for the Old Trafford game and Rooney duly obliged.

Six days later they came to Manchester and there was plenty of atmosphere outside the ground ahead of kick-off, following the behaviour of their fans and police from the away game.

Any tension quickly faded away when with less than 20 minutes played we were 3-0 up. It was incredible. Michael Carrick scored a cracker, Ronaldo grabbed a couple, christ, even Alan Smith and Patrice Evra got in on the action! 7-1? It was nuts. You don’t get to see scorelines like that too often, even as a United fan, but especially not in Europe. It was brilliant.

A fortnight later AC Milan made the trip to Manchester but this didn’t start as well as our last meeting with Italians. Kaka, the best player in the world that year, took the piss out of our defence and despite an early Ronaldo goal, we went in 2-1 down at half-time. Rooney made it 2-2 and Milan took off Gattuso. Then, in injury time, a clever pass from Giggs found Rooney and he hit it first time, taking Dida by surprise at his near post and putting us 3-2 up. He didn’t know what to do with himself as he ran away in celebration, in the end just burying his face in the pitch, seemingly overwhelmed by what he has just done.

We didn’t stand a chance in the second leg, with three of our four first choice defenders missing, which was disappointing, but I couldn’t help but feel like we had overachieved in Europe already that year. Milan rested their players in their preceding league fixture with them out of the title race months before, something United couldn’t afford to do, and were worthy winners. But that doesn’t take away from how amazing it felt when Rooney put away the winner at Old Trafford.

Rooney and Ronaldo

We were told in the summer that Ronaldo’s United career was over after a game in the World Cup between England and Portugal saw Wayne Rooney sent off. The press blamed the sending off on Ronaldo because he was one of five Portugal players complaining to the referee about a supposed stamp by Rooney.

Ronaldo’s home was vandalised and it looked as though he would be off, not fancying the hassle that was about to come his way. Sir Alex Ferguson talked him round though and it was confirmed he was staying. We knew this lad had the potential to be special, with his goal tally increasing every season, so it was great news that he was staying.

The first game of the season saw us batter Fulham 5-1 with Ronaldo and Rooney linking up time and again. The two brightest young talents in the league weren’t at war, as the press would have had us believe, and that opening day was all the proof we needed of that.

Vassell’s penalty miss

If we beat City, Chelsea had to beat Arsenal the following day to deny us from winning the league. Ronaldo’s first half penalty put us 1-0 up but we looked knackered. Three days earlier the lads had been in Milan getting thrashed and didn’t those bitter blue bastards enjoy rubbing that one in.

Ten minutes from time, it looked as though City were going to delay our title win, after Wes Brown gave away a penalty. The City fans were wild with excitement, eyes bulging and mouths frothing.

Fortunately, Darius Vassell was on penalty taking duties, and blasted the ball centrally at Van der Sar’s legs. The relief felt was amazing and was only bettered by getting to give all that shit back to the City fans.

“We won the football league again, inside the council house,” we sang as we left the ground. Mourinho’s £9m defender, Boulharouz, got sent off the next day in their game against Arsenal and they drew. United were champions.

4-2 at Goodison Park

With just half an hour left to play against Everton, we were 2-0 down. After topping the table all season, surely we weren’t going to throw it away now? Our remaining fixtures were City and Chelsea away before West Ham, who denied us the title in 1995, at home.

We had to win this one, but we were losing and Chelsea were beating Bolton. After a gruelling game against Milan just four days before you wondered whether we would have the legs for this one.

O’Shea got a goal back for us before Phil Neville scored an own goal to level the score. Once a red, always a red, and all that. With ten minutes left to go, some excellent control before a lovely finish from Rooney put us 3-2 up. It was unbelievable. Fergie ran to the touchline, “2-2″ he signalled with his fingers, letting the lads know that the Chelsea game had finished.

Just to add insult to injury, United youngster Chris Eagles popped up with one of our goals of the season, curling the ball perfectly in to the bottom corner.

Of course the City win was massive but it was on this day that it felt that the title was ours. Not so long ago it felt as if Mourinho and Abramovich were going to dominate our league for years to come, yet here we were, one hand on the trophy, ready to be Champions again. This was typical United, making things difficult for themselves, having you on the edge of your seat, before going out and getting the job done. One of my favourite football days ever and certainly the highlight of 2006/2007 for me.

Evidence
- The FA and Evra watched some video footage of the match. Evra pointed out to the FA, by reference to the video footage, when it was during the match that Suarez made the comments about which Evra had complained. This information enabled the FA to ask broadcasters to provide video footage. It contained material which was not broadcast, including footage of the exchanges in the penalty area in the 63rd minute taken from a number of different camera angles.

- The FA arranged to meet Suarez to obtain his account of what had taken place Suarez was accompanied by an interpreter from the Club . An independent professional interpreter was also present. On the same day, the FA also interviewed Kenny Dalglish, Damien Comolli, Ray Haughan (the Liverpool Team Administration Manager) and Kuyt. The interviews were recorded and transcripts were produced.

- The FA obtained signed witness statements from the following individuals: Evra, Marriner (the referee), Phil Dowd (the fourth official at the match), Sir Alex Ferguson, Ryan Giggs, Valencia, Hernandez, Nani, and Anderson. In the case of each of the Manchester United players who provided a witness statement, except for Mr Giggs, the statement was provided in the player’s native language and also in English, using the services of a professional translator.

- The FA instructed two experts, Dr Scorer and Professor Wade. The experts were instructed to prepare a written report on the linguistic and cultural interpretations of the words “negro” and “negros” in Rioplatense Spanish. The FA provided the experts with relevant materials, including 12 video clips of the match, the witness statement of Evra and the transcript of the interview with Suarez.

- Material which the FA had gathered or considered in the course of its investigation but on which it did not intend to rely was given to Suarez. The purpose of providing it to Suarez was to enable him and his advisers to examine the unused material to see whether, in their view, it was relevant and helpful to Suarez in defending the Charge. For example, the contents of a document amongst the unused material might be thought by Suarez and his advisers to be directly helpful in itself or to set them on a train of enquiry which might lead to their acquiring helpful evidence. The disclosure to Suarez of unused material is intended to achieve fairness and transparency in the process.

Suarez’s defence
If Suarez did not intend his words or behaviour to be abusive or insulting, then he did not breach the Rule. Suarez would breach the Rule, according to his defence, only if he intended his words or behaviour to be abusive or insulting, or was aware that they may be abusive or insulting.

Thoughts of the commission
- The question is simply whether the words or behaviour are abusive or insulting. This is a matter for the Commission to decide, having regard to all the relevant facts and circumstances of the case. It is not necessary that the alleged offender intends his words or behaviour to be abusive or insulting in order for him to breach the Rule.

- The FA accepts that the Charge against Suarez is serious, as do we. It is for this reason that we have reminded ourselves that a greater burden of evidence is required to prove the Charge against Suarez.

What actually happened? – The goalmouth
- Evra said that he is not exactly fluent in Spanish but that he can easily converse in Spanish. Evra told us that he began the conversation by saying “Concha de tu hermana”. Evra’s evidence was that this is a phrase used in Spanish like when you say “fucking hell” in English.

- Evra claims that when he asked “Why did you kick me?”, Suarez replied “Porque tu eres negro”. Evra said that at the time Suarez made that comment, he (Evra) understood it to mean “Because you are a nigger”. He now says that he believes the words used by Mr Suarez mean “Because you are black”.

- Suarez said that he replied to Mr Evra’s question “Why did you kick me?” by saying “que habia sido una falta normal”, meaning “it was just a normal foul”. He said he shrugged his shoulders and put his arms out in a gesture to say that there was nothing serious about it. At this point on the video footage, Mr Suarez’s face is obscured, but he does appear to shrug his shoulders.

- Evra said that he followed up Suarez’s reply “Because you are black” by saying “Habla otra vez asi, te voy a dar una porrada”, which means “Say it to me again, I’m going to punch you”. Suarez replied by saying “No hablo con los negros”. Evra said that, at the time, he understood this to mean “I don’t speak to niggers”, although he now says it means “I don’t speak to blacks”.

- Suarez’s evidence was that Evra replied to the comment “it was just a normal foul” by saying “Ok, you kicked me, I’m going to kick you”. Suarez said in his witness statement that his response was “Le dije que se callara e hice un gesto breve con mi mano izquierda parecido a la mocion de un “pato cuando hace cuac” para indicarle que hablaba mucho y deberia callarse”, which was translated as “I told him to shut up and made a brief gesture with my left hand like a “quacking” motion as if to say he was talking too much and should be quiet”.

- Evra said that after Suarez said “I don’t speak to blacks”, he (Evra) said “Ahora te voy a dar realmente una porrada”, which means “Okay, now I think I’m going to punch you”. To this he says that Suarez replied “Dale, negro…negro…negro”. At the time, Evra understood this to mean “Okay, nigger, nigger, nigger”. He now says it means “Okay, blackie, blackie, blackie”. The expert witnesses stated that the phrase “Dale, negro” can be
understood as “Bring it on, blackie” or “do it, blackie” or “go ahead, blackie”. Evra said that as Suarez was speaking he reached out to touch Evra’s arm, gesturing at his skin. Evra said that Suarez was drawing attention to the colour of Evra’s skin. This gesture is clearly shown on the video footage, just as Kuyt comes
between them. It seemed to us that Suarez reached out and pinched Evra’s left forearm. In cross-examination, Evra said that at the time he did not realise that Suarez had pinched his arm. He was more focussed on his lips and what he was saying.

- Suarez said that at no point did he use the word “negro” during the exchange with Evra in the goalmouth.

- Evra’s evidence is that up to this point Mr Suarez had used the word “negro” or “negros” five times in the goalmouth: “Because you are black”, “I don’t speak to blacks” and “Okay, blackie, blackie, blackie”.

- When the referee blew his whistle to stop play, Evra and Suarez were standing close to each other, having just run and challenged for the corner. The referee called them over to him. Suarez said something to Evra, then started to walk away. There is a clear reaction by Evra to Suarez’s comment. This is apparent in two
ways. First, there is a facial reaction by Evra, akin to a look of surprise. Secondly, whilst looking at the referee, Evra points to Suarez. Evra walks towards the referee and says something while pointing back at Suarez. Evra’s evidence was that while he was walking towards the referee he said “ref, ref, he
just called me a fucking black”. He said that he did not know whether the referee heard his comment. The referee said something like “Calm down, Patrice, the game has been brilliant, stop the pushing between you and Suarez, the game is going well.”

- Suarez’s evidence was that simultaneously with the blowing of the whistle, Evra said to him “Don’t touch me, South American”. Suarez took this to be a reference to his touching Evra’s arm on the goal-line a few moments earlier. Suarez said that he turned to Evra and said “Por que, negro?”. He said that he used the word “negro” at this point in the way that he did when he was growing up in Uruguay, that is as a friendly
form of address to people seen as black or brown-skinned or even just black-haired. He said that he used it in the same way that he did when he spoke to Glen Johnson, the black Liverpool player. He said in no way was the use of the word “negro” intended to be offensive or to be racially offensive. It was intended as an attempt at conciliation.

- Marriner, the referee, was shown the footage of this incident at the hearing. Marriner said that he could not recall what was being said to him. He explained that he wanted to take control of the situation, that the game had gone “swimmingly” up until that point with no confrontation between any players, and he just wanted to get his point across to the players. He said that he told the players to get on with it, and calm down. That is why he took charge of the situation and really did not take on board what was being said to him. We found Mr Marriner’s account to be plausible and credible. The fact that Mr Marriner did not hear what Mr Evra said is not inconsistent with Mr Evra’s evidence.

What actually happened? – Evra is booked

- As the players moved upfield, there was an exchange between Evra and Kuyt. The referee called Evra over and gave him a yellow card. Giggs spoke to the referee about the caution and then spoke to Evra.

- Evra described the booking in the following way. Kuyt told him to stop diving so Evra pushed him away. The referee called Evra over to book him. Evra asked the referee why he was booking him and the referee said it was because he had pushed Kuyt. When he was being booked, Mr Evra told the referee again that he had been called black. Evra added that after booking him, the referee spoke to Ryan Giggs. Giggs then asked Evra what was wrong and Evra told him that he had been called black. Giggs told Evra to calm down and not get sent off.

- Giggs gave evidence before us. He said that he was reasonably close to the referee and after he had shown Evra the yellow card, Giggs approached the referee and asked him why he had booked Evra. The referee said to Giggs “just calm Patrice down”. It was obvious to Giggs from looking at Evra that he was upset. Giggs said to Evra “what’s happened?”. Evra replied “he called me black”. Giggs said to Evra “did the ref hear it?”, to which Mr Evra replied “I don’t think so”. Giggs then told Evra to calm down and not get himself sent off.

- Kuyt gave a slightly different version from Marriner, Evra and Giggs. He said that after the goal kick he was close to Evra and said “Come on, let’s move on, let’s keep going with the game” and touched Evra just on the arm. According to Kuyt, Evra reacted aggressively and smashed his arm away and at that point, the referee
having seen the incident, called Evra to him and booked him. Kuyt said he was “absolutely certain” that he heard Evra say that the referee was only booking him because he was black.

- We found the evidence of Marriner on this point to be credible and plausible. He recalled Evra telling him that he was being called black. This is consistent with Evra’s evidence of what he told Marriner at that time, and also with Giggs’ evidence of what Evra said to him shortly afterwards. In light of this, we reject Kuyt’s evidence that Evra said that the referee was only booking him because he was black. It would make no sense in the circumstances for Evra to accuse the referee of only booking him because he was black. Not only had Evra pushed Kuyt away, which he is likely to have realised had led to his booking, but his concern at that stage was that he had been called black (bearing in mind that, at the very least, Suarez admits having called Evra “negro” by this stage of the game).

What actually happened? – After the final whistle
- As the players went into the dressing room at the end of the game, Evra was really angry and upset. Valencia said he could see it. He explained that Evra is not normally angry after games. Evra said that he was angry because Suarez had insulted him. “I cannot remember exactly the words Evra used but he said that Suarez had said that he wouldn’t speak to him because he was black. I think the words Evra used
were words similar to “Negro, no hablas conmigo”.”

- Hernandez: “Although I was stood with the medical staff, I could clearly hear Evra as he was speaking loudly. He said that during the game, Suarez said to him words similar to “No voy a platicar contigo porque eres negro”. I understood from what Evra said that Suarez had been racially abusive towards him and that he had told Evra that he would not speak to him because he was black.”

- Nani: “He said that Suarez had said that he wouldn’t talk to him because he was black. When he said this in English I think he used the word “nigger” but in Spanish/Portuguese he used the word “negro” or “preto”, I cannot remember exactly which. Evra was also angry that Suarez had not been booked for saying what he did. Evra said something like, “This is a joke. How is it possible that the referee does nothing when he knows what happened?” Evra said that he had told the referee what Suarez said to him.”

- Anderson: “I cannot remember all the exact words Evra used but he told us that Suarez had said to him on the pitch that he wouldn’t speak to Evra because he was black. I think he used words similar to “no hablo con negro”.”

- Valencia and Anderson told Mr Evra that he must tell the manager and go and see the referee because this was serious. When Sir Alex Ferguson and Evra left the dressing room to go and speak to the referee, Valencia and Anderson followed them. They wanted to support Evra but they were not allowed into the referee’s room, only Evra and Sir Alex Ferguson went in.

- Evra said that he told the referee that Suarez had called him a nigger. According to Evra, the referee said to him “Oh, that is why you were talking about being called black”, referring back to what Evra had said to the referee on the pitch. Evra said “Yes.”

What actually happened? – When LFC found out about the accusation
- Ray Haughan is the Team Administration Manager at Liverpool FC. He gave a witness statement on behalf of Suarez. While he was standing outside the dressing rooms after the end of the game, he saw Sir Alex Ferguson and Evra go into the referee’s room. Sir Alex knocked on the door, which was not closed, and went in. Haughan told us that he heard Sir Alex say “I want to make a complaint because Suarez has called him (meaning Evra) a nigger five times.” Haughan thought that the Liverpool management should be aware of what was happening. He went to see the management, Kenny Dalglish, Damien Comolli and Steve Clarke.

- Comolli spoke to Suarez in Spanish. Dalglish said that, having spoken to Suarez, Mr Comolli explained to Dalglish that Suarez had said that Evra had called him South American and that Suarez had replied “Tu eres negro” which is “you are black”. Comolli reported the Spanish words to Dalglish, that is he told him that Suarez had said “Tu eres negro”, and then Comolli told Dalglish that this meant “you are black”. Suarez was still in the room when Comolli told Dalglish that Suarez had said “Tu eres negro” to Evra.

- Dalglish went to see Marriner and Dowd without Suarez. Marriner explained to Dalglish what had been reported to him by Sir Alex and Evra. Marriner said in his witness statement that Evra had told him that Suarez had said to him “I don’t talk to you because you niggers”, although Dalglish told us that he did not remember the referee saying that to him. Since Suarez accepted Marriner’s witness statement, we accept Marriner’s evidence that he said this to Dalglish.

- Dalglish said, “hasn’t he done this before?”. This was the evidence to us of Dowd. Dowd remembered this as it caused him to consciously stop and think whether he was aware of any previous allegation involving Evra.

What actually happened? – Canal+
- Comolli made reference to Mr Evra’s Canal+ interview. He said that a few hours after the game, he received telephone calls from Canal+ who said that Evra had been to see them in the tunnel after the game and said “I want to talk on TV. I want to report my record because I’ve been abused racially by Suarez ten times”.

- Evra served a supplemental witness statement to clarify the circumstances surrounding the interview he gave to Canal+. He said that as he is the only French player in the Manchester United team, Canal+ ask him to do an interview with them after every game. He usually agrees to the interviews and would probably agree to 25 out of every 30 requests. After the match, Canal+ asked Mr Evra for an interview as usual and he agreed. He said that he knew the Canal+ staff well and they could see that he was upset by something. He told them what had happened between Suarez and him during the game. Evra denied saying what Mr Comolli said he was told, namely that he wanted to talk on TV and report his record because he had been abused racially by Suarez ten times. He said that he specifically asked Canal+ not to ask him about the incident with Suarez during the interview. However, the interviewer did ask him about why he was upset with Suarez during the game. Evra decided to answer the question but was careful not to say exactly the words that had been used. He told us that he would have preferred for the interviewer not to ask him about the incident but journalists always ask whatever they like.

- The FA obtained from the Canal+ interviewer his account of what had happened. Stephane Guy, the interviewer, said that Evra answered the interviewer’s request for an interview. He said that as Evra is the only French-speaking player at Man United, the interviewer asks him each time that he covers the team’s matches. Noticing that he was very distressed coming out of the changing room, Guy first questioned Mr Evra off the record. It was then that Evra revealed what Guy described as “what has become the Suarez case”. According to Guy, it was his duty as a journalist to ask Evra the same question again on the record even if he was not spontaneously in agreement to talk about it.

- Evra added that when he answered the question, he mentioned that a word had been said to him ten times. He told us that he did not mean this in the literal sense, it was just a way of talking. It was just a figure of speech.

The language experts
- The experts who were instructed are Professor Peter Wade and Dr James Scorer. Wade is a specialist in race and ethnicity in Latin America, with particular emphasis on black populations, genetics and sexuality; he has also worked on the ties between Colombian national identity, popular music and race. He learnt his Spanish mainly in Colombia, has been a fluent speaker for nearly 30 years, and has experience of Spanish usage mainly in Colombia, Mexico and Spain. James Scorer works in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies. His research focuses on Latin American cities, particularly urban politics and cultures in Buenos Aires, as well as on national and regional identities in Latin American cinema, including that of Uruguay. He learnt his Spanish predominantly in Buenos Aires, and has been a fluent speaker of Castellano for nearly 10 years.

- The word “negro” can have pejorative connotations, as it may be associated with low class status, ugliness, vulgar behaviour, noisiness, violence, dishonesty, sexual promiscuity etc. The word can be employed with the intent to offend and to offend in racial terms; often the word would be appended with further insult, as in the example “negro de mierda” [shitty black]. The word “negro” is by no means, however, always used offensively. The term can also be used as a friendly form of address to someone seen as somewhat brown-skinned or even just black-haired. It may be used affectionately between man and wife, or girlfriend/boyfriend, it may be used as a nickname in everyday speech, it may be used to identify in neutral and descriptive fashion someone of dark skin. Though these terms are often used between friends or relatives, they are not used exclusively so; thus, an individual might call out to a passer-by “ay, negro, querés jugar con nosotros?” [hey, blackie, do you want to play with us?]; in all cases, however, when the word is used in this way it implies a sense of rapport or the attempt to create such rapport; naturally, if the term were used with a sneer, then it might carry negative connotations.

- Evra stated that the goalmouth incident started when he addressed Suarez, beginning with the phrase “Concha de tu hermana”. According to the experts, the literal translation is “your sister’s cunt” and it can be taken as a general swear word expressing anger, although the word “concha” is not as taboo as the English word “cunt”. It is thus equivalent to “fucking hell” or “fuck me”.

- Assuming Suarez responded with “Porque tu eres negro”, this would be interpreted in Uruguay and other regions of Latin America as racially offensive. When the noun is used in the way described by Evra, it is not a friendly form of address, but is used in an insulting way: it is given as the rationale for an act of physical aggression (the foul), as if the person deserved such an attack since they are black.

- The sentence attributed to Suarez, “No hablo con los negros”, falls into the same category of racist usage. It assumes that the individual did not merit being talked to as he belongs to a whole category of people classed as black.

- If Suarez used the words “negro” and “negros” as described by Evra, this would be understood as offensive and offensive in racial terms in Uruguay and Spanish-speaking America more generally. The physical gesture of touching Mr Evra’s arm would also, in the context of the phrases used, be interpreted as racist.

- If Suarez used the word “negro” as described by Suarez, this would not be interpreted as either
offensive or offensive in racial terms in Uruguay.

- There are some black people in Uruguay and other areas of Latin America who object to the use of the word “negro” as a term of address, as they say it highlights skin colour when this should be irrelevant. This is the use of the word “negro” (ie as a term of address) which Suarez contended before us is acceptable, yet his view appears to be contentious with some in Uruguay and Latin America. Also, the use of the word “negro” can be seen as offensive or inoffensive in Uruguay and Latin America. It appears to depend, largely, on the context. It might be seen by some as inoffensive when used to address relatives, friends or passers-by. However, we note the experts’ comment that in all cases when the word is used in this way it implies a sense of rapport or the attempt to create such rapport; naturally, if the term were used with a sneer, then it might carry negative connotations. It is important to examine closely the context in which it is used, and the way in which it is used, in order to decide whether it is being used offensively and offensively in racial terms.

How to make a decision
This case is not simply about one person’s word against another. Whilst there were conflicting accounts of what happened which were presented to us by Evra and Suarez, there was other relevant evidence which we were able to take into account in reaching our decision. This other evidence included:
* video footage of the match
* the evidence of others as to what happened during or immediately after the match
* documentation in the form of the referee’s report which was based on conversations he had immediately after the match
* transcripts of interviews with the main protagonists and other witnesses conducted in the course of the FA’s investigation before witness statements were prepared for the purpose of this hearing
* the evidence given to us by other witnesses quite apart from Evra and Suarez, including expert witnesses on Spanish language.
We reached our decision on the basis of a consideration of the totality of the evidence attaching such weight as we considered appropriate to the different elements of it.

- It was accepted by both Mr Greaney (FA’s representative) and Mr McCormick (Suarez’s representative) in closing submissions that this is not simply a case of one person’s word against another.

- We found Mr Evra to be an impressive witness. He gave his evidence to us in a calm, composed and clear manner. Evra also demonstrated a measure of balance in his evidence and he was prepared to make a number of concessions before us. In giving his account of their exchanges in the goalmouth, Evra described how he started the conversation with the offensive phrase, “Concha de tu hermana”. He said this in his first interview with the FA on 20 October, and included it in his witness statement placed before us, even though it reflected badly on him.

- Suarez was not as impressive a witness as Evra. His answers were not always clear or directly addressed to the question. Whether this was due to language difficulties or evasiveness was not entirely clear and so, whenever we could, we gave Mr Suarez the benefit of the doubt. We were certainly more concerned by the substance of his evidence than by the manner in which he gave it.

Suarez and Dalglish’s inconsistencies
- The footage was not of any real direct assistance in terms of what was said by Suarez in the goalmouth. It was not possible to try and lip-read what Suarez said largely because his face was obscured at the crucial moments. However, the video footage did shed considerable light on the sequence of events and the way in
which Evra and Suarez acted towards each other.

- Evra started the encounter in the goalmouth, albeit Evra was in shock (as he put it) and responding to Mr Suarez having fouled him five minutes previously. Evra opened the conversation with the offensive phrase, although Mr Suarez did not hear the words he used at the time. Evra was the initiator of this confrontation. He was clearly angry with Mr Suarez. Suarez responded in kind. His facial expression was hostile towards Evra, he was speaking forcefully to him, he looked Evra up and down and then reached out and pinched Evra’s bare left forearm. This was an unpleasant and petty gesture which appeared designed to aggravate Evra, and was likely to have that effect.

- The referee spoke to both players. They listened and then walked away. As they did, Suarez put his hand on the back of Evra’s head. There are, of course, many ways of touching an opposing player with the hand. Some are obvious attempts at conciliation such as a handshake or sometimes a pat on the back. Others are intended to further aggravate the opposing player whilst, perhaps, being made to appear like an attempt at
conciliation. In our judgment, Suarez placing his hand on the back of Evra’s head fell into the latter category. It appeared calculated to wind him up and had that effect, which is shown by Evra forcefully pushing Suarez’s arm away.

- Having said in his witness statement that he was trying to defuse the situation when he touched Evra’s left arm in a “pinching type movement”, Suarez eventually answered, after persistent questioning, that he was not trying to calm down the situation by doing so. It was plain to us that Suarez’s pinching of Evra’s arm was not an attempt to defuse the situation. It could not conceivably be described in that way. In our judgment, the pinching was calculated to have the opposite effect, namely to aggravate Evra and to inflame the situation.

- Whilst Suarez had, in his interview with the FA, said that he had used the word “negro” towards Evra in a “friendly and affectionate” way, the first time that he used the words “conciliation” and “conciliatory” was in his witness statement. This was signed after Suarez had received the experts’ report which referred to the possibility that Suarez’s use of the term was intended as an attempt at conciliation. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Suarez used the words conciliation and conciliatory to describe his use of the word “negro” because the experts had used those terms to describe the circumstances in which the word would not generally be offensive in Uruguay.

- What is more significant, in our judgment, is the substance of Suarez’s evidence that his use of the word “negro” with Evra “was intended as an attempt at conciliation” and “was meant in a conciliatory and friendly way”. The whole episode in the match starting with Suarez’s foul on Evra, and continuing with their encounter in the penalty area was confrontational and hostile. In the goalmouth, Evra fired the first verbal assault and Suarez responded in a hostile fashion judged by his demeanour as shown on the video footage and his pinching of Evra’s skin. When the referee blew his whistle to stop play, it was less than 10 seconds after the pinching in the goalmouth. This is when Suarez claimed to have used the word “negro” for the one and only time. The players’ demeanour, as shown in the video footage, showed that the exchanges continued to be confrontational. This was followed, after the referee had spoken to the players, by
Suarez putting his hand on the back of Evra’s head in a way which, in our judgment, was intended to aggravate Evra. The whole tenor of the players’ exchanges during this episode was one of animosity. They behaved in a confrontational and argumentative way. Whilst Mr Evra is partly to blame for starting the confrontation at that moment, Suarez’s attitude and actions were the very antithesis of the conciliation and friendliness that he would have us believe.

- Suarez’s use of the term was not intended as an attempt at conciliation or to establish rapport; neither was it meant in a conciliatory and friendly way. It was not explained by any feeling on Mr Suarez’s part that a linguistic or cultural relationship had been established between them or that the context was one of informal
social relations. The video footage, when viewed in detail and when looked at as a whole, shows that the players continued their animosity throughout this incident. Their hostility is shown in their actions and demeanour before, at the moment of, and after Suarez’s admitted use of the word.

- Suarez spoke in Spanish to Comolli soon after the game about this serious allegation. Suarez also spoke in Dutch to Kuyt. Both Comolli and Kuyt understood Suarez to have told them that when he spoke to Evra he said words which translate into English as, “Because you are black”. According to Suarez, Comolli misheard what Suarez said in Spanish, and Kuyt misheard what Suarez said in Dutch.

- Dalglish told the referee that Suarez responded with “you are black” having first been taunted with “you are South American”. Comolli is not recorded as using the word “taunted”, but said that Evra said “you are South American” to Suarez who responded with “Tues negro” which translates “you are Black”. There is no suggestion here that Evra had said “Don’t touch me”, yet this seems now to be an essential part of Suarez’s evidence. We were not given any explanation as to why the referee was not told that Evra had said “Don’t touch me, South American”, as opposed to “you are South American”. Secondly, at least as expressly reported by Dalglish, Suarez’s remark was a riposte to being taunted by Evra. If that is correct, it would suggest that Dalglish understood Mr Suarez’s comment to be in the nature of retaliation for having been called “South American”. But that would suggest that the riposte “You are black” was used in a derogatory sense, which is contrary to Suarez’s case. In fact, Suarez told us that he did not consider being described as South American to be derogatory, so it is difficult to understand why this was referred to as a “taunt”.

-The discrepancies between what Dalglish and Comolli reported to the referee on the one hand, and Suarez’s evidence as to what he said on the other hand, have not been satisfactorily explained.

- The impression created by these inconsistencies was that Suarez’s evidence was not, on the whole, reliable. He had put forward an interpretation of events which was inconsistent with the contemporaneous video evidence. He had changed his account in a number of important respects without satisfactory explanation. As a result, we were hesitant about accepting Suarez’s account of events where it was disputed by other credible witnesses unless there was solid evidence to support it.

Key points summarised
- Kenny Dalglish trying to sway Marriner and Dowd from the start by saying “hasn’t he done this before?”. Patrice Evra has never made claims of racism against someone, unfounded or otherwise.

- To add further weight to Dalglish’s point, Dirk Kuyt falsely claimed that Evra was telling people he had only been booked by the referee because he was black. The commission found this to be entirely untrue.

- Dalglish claimed that Suarez had been “taunted” by Evra, suggesting that Suarez’s response of “you are black” was following Evra saying “you are South American.” If this was true, Suarez wasn’t using the word “negro” in a friendly way at all, rather as an insult. Regardless, Suarez confirmed that being called “South American” was not an insult.

- Comoli stressed he knew how serious the allegations were so being fluent in Spanish wanted to make sure they had their story straight on what Suarez had said. After speaking to Suarez, he then went to tell Marriner and Dowd Suarez’s version. There was no mention of Suarez calling Evra “negro” in response to Evra telling him not to touch him though, which is what his defence later hinged on. They initially claimed Suarez said “you are black” then in the next set of interviews, Suarez claimed he said “why not, black?” after Evra told him not to touch him.

- Suarez claimed that he did not call Evra a negro when they were in the goal mouth, rather after the referee had called them over to speak to them and he then touched Evra. However, his version of events contradicts the testimony of Evra and referee. Evra says that as soon as the referee called them over, Evra reported the racial abuse he had just received, and the referee confirmed this.

- Suarez initially claimed that he pinched Evra on the arm to “defuse the situation”. When he was cross examined, he admitted this was not true.

- The first time Suarez claimed that his use of the word “negro” was “conciliatory” was after the reports from the language experts were made available, where they claimed if the word “negro” was used in a “conciliatory” way, it wouldn’t be regarded as racist in Uruguay.

- Suarez’s defence claim that Evra made up Suarez saying he kicked him because he was black and that he didn’t talk to blacks. They claim that because Suarez had kicked Evra in the knee, Evra wanted revenge, so fabricated the whole story. This means they are suggesting that Evra feigned outrage after his exchange with Suarez and lied to the referee, that he lied to Giggs on the pitch when he asked him what was the matter, and that he lied to Valencia, Chichartio, Nani, Anderson and Sir Alex Ferguson in the dressing room immediately after the game. The commission rejected the defence’s suggestion that the accusations were just an elaborate plot for Evra to get revenge on Suarez for being kicked.

- Comolli claimed that after the game Evra went to Canal+ and demanded that he was allowed to report the racial abuse he had just received. The journalist who interviewed Evra confirmed this opposite of this was true, and that Evra knew the journalist well and he could tell that he was upset. Evra told the journalist off the record what had happened, but the journalist confirmed he asked the question when Evra was being filmed regardless.

After the final whistle, the talk of Manchester becoming the new Milan was quickly replaced with jokes about Channel 5 (we will actually be playing on ITV4, meh) and comparison with the teams from London who had progressed though. Whilst there were some blues and reds who could console themselves with the failure of their rivals, it mattered little to me. At some point, I’m sure I’ll find it funny that Sheikh Mansour can’t even buy City success, but all their failure means to me is we’re saved from the unbearable piss taking that would have ensued. Their misery doesn’t soften the blow for our own pain and I am genuinely gutted we failed to get out of the group.

Patrice Evra spoke well on the topic, as he usually does, expressing the feelings of plenty of fans.  “We deserve to be out,” he said. “But it is embarrassing to be in the Europa League.” Embarrassing is right. It’s impossible to avoid sounding like a snob or massively spoilt, but that competition is there for those who aren’t good enough for the Champions League and it’s embarrassing we’re lumped in with those second rate sides. APOEL are good enough for the elite competition, so are Napoli and FC Basel, but we’re with Stoke and the like in the bloody Europa League. It’s sickening.

Roy Keane was critical of the younger players on Wednesday and whilst I agreed with a lot of what he said, my initial reaction was to feel defensive of our youngsters. But our former captain doesn’t have any time for sentimentality and when you break it down, De Gea fucked up for the first goal and one of Evans or Smalling should have dealt with the second. I’m not putting blame on their doorstep and we learn more from our failures than our success, but there’s no tinted specs where Keano is concerned and on the night, some of the younger lads didn’t do their job and it cost us.

Keane said the players were letting the manager down and that’s true. The young ones have time to learn but it is the more experienced players, who should have taken the game by the balls and shown urgency from the first whistle, who need to “take a look in the mirror”, as Evra said. Yes, we dominated the game and yes we created enough chances to win it, but there’s no excuse for us not getting a draw. There’s no excuse for Rooney not burying that cross from Nani in the first half. Excruciating.

Essentially though, it’s the games at home we will be left to regret. The FC Basel game at home was the biggest joke of the lot and that is the game that knocked us out. Danny Welbeck put us 2-0 up with less than 20 minutes played but we found ourselves 3-2 down in injury time before Ashley Young drew us level. Joke.

So now we have the Europa League and the only thing that will take the edge off the pain for me is if we field the team we would have used for the League Cup. I’ve heard reds saying that we should go for it, that it would be great for Fergie to win it, but I can’t get my head around that way of thinking at all. Here comes the football snob in me again but who gives a shit about the Europa League? If it was the final tomorrow night, yes, obviously I’d want us to play our strongest team and win it, but the damage that competition could do to us is not worth the benefit. We’re without Nemanja Vidic for the rest of the season now because of one Champions League game, as if we can afford to risk any more of our players in trying to win the Europa League. If we got to the semis, maybe then take it more seriously, as silverware is silverware, but we should rely on our youngsters and fringe players to get us there, and if they can’t, no big deal.

The overriding feeling for me though, and one that is sadly so repetitive and dull, is we would not be in this position if we had brought in the quality central midfielder we’ve been crying out for. The cost of missing out on Champions League football from this point on is reportedly worth £20m. To make you sick, David Silva cost £24m and Juan Mata cost £26m, two players who have been brilliant in the Premier League, yet we wouldn’t splash the cash on a top midfielder. Could we afford to buy one? The answer is we couldn’t afford not to buy one, and our Champions League exit has gone a long way to proving that.

It isn’t so much the transfer fee that apparently held us back but the obsession with keeping the wage bill down. That’s why the likes of John O’Shea and Wes Brown were sold last summer and why Rio Ferdinand will probably be allowed to leave this summer. The best players want the best wages and whilst I love seeing us bring players like De Gea, Jones, Smalling, Cleverley, Welbeck and the Da Silvas in to the first team, that doesn’t mean I don’t want someone top class in the centre of the park, someone who has dozens of Champions League games under their belt, who has played in finals and World Cups. If we can break the bank for Rooney, who’s hardly set the world alight since forcing the club to pay him a small fortune on a weekly basis, then why aren’t we doing the same for a top player in arguably the most important position?

It’s not all doom and gloom though. We’ve got a good squad and we’ve got the best manager. I still think we’ll win the league, even if Vidic’s injury makes that a lot more difficult, and not having the annual Champions League quarter/semi finals to deal with in the last couple of months of the season will help with that. But that’s beside the point. It shouldn’t be either, or, where United are concerned. Cristiano Ronaldo guided us to that brilliant league and European Cup double in 2008 and the £80m we got for him has not been reinvested in to another superstar, regardless of how highly I rate some of the individuals that have been bought since his exit.

If anything positive can come from this it is the wake up call the Glazers and Ferguson need. We must bring in someone special and we must do it as soon as possible, if this season in Europe is to be an anomaly and not a more common occurrence.

We’ll never die.

None of which explains why many United fans take such strong exception to the term, which some regard as the ultimate badge of ‘Glory Hunter’ inauthenticty. Given the routine and unapologetic use of ‘Man U’ outside the UK by people who may have followed the club from afar for decades it’s worth investigating this small but not insignificant verbal schism in a bit more detail.

Having got the chronology straight, let’s now look at one of the reasons most frequently cited for why true Reds should have nothing to do with ‘Man U’, centred round a song mocking the death of one of United’s greatest heroes.

Duncan Edwards, WBA fans and ‘Manure’

The fact that United’s teenage England international Phil Jones has been likened by good judges of the game to the great Duncan Edwards, who died over half a century ago in Munich at the age of 21, probably tells us more about the latter than the former. Sir Bobby Charlton has said that ‘Big Dunc’ was the best player he’s ever seen, the only one who ‘made me feel inferior’, thus endorsing Edwards’ status as one of the ‘all-time greats’. He’s always had a very special place in my heart too, even though I never saw him play. After the air crash on 6 February 1958 he was grievously injured but through sheer strength of will somehow lived on for a couple of weeks before finally expiring. As an eleven-year-old I became obsessed with his condition throughout that period, checking the papers as soon as they arrived through the letter box at home, sometimes with better news, sometimes worse. I was deeply affected by his death, as remembered to this day by my closest school friend at the time.

To me Duncan in death embodied all the qualities one might want in any near-mythical sporting hero. He was the master of every footballing skill, including pin-point long and short passing with either foot, tackling with awesome power and precision, a towering header of the ball and finally, the possessor of cannonball shooting power, earning him the nickname of ‘Boom Boom’ Edwards in West Germany after he bulged their net from way out for England. But his appeal to me went beyond any of that. It was his widely acknowledged sportsmanship and generosity of spirit that attracted me, together with his modest, down-to-earth demeanour. His team-mates always looked to him as an inspirational match-winner and he became England’s youngest-ever debutant aged 18, and helped his fellow Busby Babes to successive league titles in ’56 and ’57. None of this went to his head and he seems never to have lost his innocent, bounding, almost child-like enthusiasm for the game, whilst displaying the deep-chested, mighty-thighed strength of an adult. In a way that is rare in such a macho culture, people like Sir Bobby who knew him well openly speak of having loved the man.

That’s why it is so shocking that supporters of West Bromwich Albion came up with a terrace chant not long after Munich, playing – with massive lack of subtlety- on the term Man U, mocking the memory of a kid who’d grown up just round the corner in the West Midlands, in nearby Dudley:

‘Duncan Edwards is Manure, rotting in his grave,
Man You are Manure, rotting in your grave
Man U, Man U never intended coming home…’

It should be noted that the first letters of the words in the last line add up to ‘Munich’, clearly intended to add to the taunting nature of the insult, albeit somewhat desperately.

There’s no doubt this demeaning, witless little song is pathetic at all levels, and it’s good to hear that WBA fans quickly dropped it from their repertoire. But is this ancient chant really enough to warrant some sort of purist United ban on the term Man U, as some insist? As it happens, most Reds seem unconvinced by the demand, and treat the chant as a repugnant but essentially irrelevant historical curiosity, and either carry on saying Man U or find other grounds for dropping it.

But before we pass on it’s worth taking a closer look at the song, not to berate WBA fans after all these years, nor to judge whether it really does in itself justify a boycott of the term Man U, but to put it into its proper historical context. If we do that I think we’ll see that far from being just a throw-away insult from long ago, it’s actually the progenitor of a whole tradition of open resentment and hostility towards Manchester United and everything the club stands for, played out over five decades.

Then it was West Brom and ‘Duncan Edwards is Manure’, now it’s across the nation and ‘Stand Up if You Hate Man U’.

Munich songs

If it wasn’t so repulsive it would be laughable that after over half a century we still get rival fans provocatively chanting their dismal songs celebrating Munich, often accompanied with that awful arms-out-wide ‘aircraft’ gesture. The phenomenon is mainly associated with Leeds United and Liverpool supporters, who seem deaf to all appeals to respect the dead and their families, but it seems that the Manure song was the first, which is really inexplicable coming from Albion fans, who had no particular history of strong rivalry with United before Munich.

It’s not clear quite when the Manure song was created but it’s possible it was around the time of the two FA Cup ties United played against WBA less than a month after Munich. The makeshift Reds forced a 2-2 draw at the Hawthorns and then won the replay 1-0 with a last-gasp winner in early March, 1958. Both matches were tremendously intense and totally gripping, as you can tell from the Pathe Newreel coverage, played in a breathtakingly competitive but entirely sporting spirit throughout.

The growing resentment against United

At first sight it might seem absurd to think people would be celebrating Munich so soon after the Crash, but in fact there was a hidden, largely forgotten and darker side to the public response to the tragedy, almost from the first. While most people in Manchester genuinely felt the communal sense of loss that is still the prevailing memory of Munich there were some Manchester City fans who have shamefacedly admitted in recent times that they celebrated the destruction of their rivals’ team in the pub as soon as they heard the news. They were presumably indifferent to the fact that City’s former star goalkeeper Frank Swift was among the eight journalists who were killed. To this day a significant number of City fans still derisively refer to United as ‘Munichs’, as do lumpen supporters from other clubs.

Contrary to the widespread impression that bitterness over the national wave of sympathy for Munich only came in later years when United became successful again, there were in fact open expressions of antagonism from the start.On the very day of the WBA replay, for instance, a Rochdale fan had this to say in one of the local Manchester papers:

‘I and thousands of other people who read your paper are fed up with all the bunkum that is written about Manchester United. We will grant that they have been a good team, but why not face facts…’ (Manchester Evening Chronicle, 5 March, 1958)

This was not the only expression of opinion along these lines. Another correspondent had earlier attacked the,

‘mass hysteria that causes ”the sheep”, for want of something better to do, to flock to Old Trafford terraces on Saturdays’. (Manchester Evening Chronicle, 26 February, 1958).

Lord has no mercy

Nor was it only disgruntled local letter writers who had a go at the supposed excess of sympathy flooding towards United. Less than a fortnight after the Crash, Burnley’s famous butcher chairman, Bob Lord, whose puffy face and thick neck resembled the meat he sold, objected to the idea of other clubs loaning or selling players to United to help them get over the crisis caused by having lost much more than a complete first team plus coaching staff to death and injury. He said,

‘No matter how sorry we feel for them they entered the European Cup knowing the risk and now thay should not feel that clubs are obliged to sell their best players on their behalf’ (Burnley Express & Burnley News, 19 February, 1958)

In fact United only bought two players in this period, neither at a particularly cut price, veteran ‘schemer’ Ernie Taylor from Blackpool and journeyman half-back Stan Crowther from Villa, both of whom left within months. There was no mass grab at talent by United. Expressions of sorrow amounted to very little in practical terms. United had to recover more or less alone.

When Bob Lord’s Burnley beat United 3-0 in the following month there may have been a legacy of bad feeling. The match on my 12th birthday – March 15 – descended into a mass 22-player brawl on the pitch and United’s 18-year-old Mark ‘Pancho’ Pearson was sent off, provoking the famous comment attributed to Lord that United behaved like ‘Teddy Boys’, a tag that never really left the side-burned Pancho. I remember the outrage I felt at the time over blobby Bob’s words which felt to me like a coldly deliberate belittlement of the kids who’d just been thrown into the deep end in horrendous circumstances.

Oddly, Matt Busby remained a good friend of the Burnley Chairman, whose club won the league title two years later with an excellent team, although they were undoubtedly helped by the fact that United were in no position to compete. It’s easily forgotten that several leading clubs were assisted for several years by United being taken out of the equation by Munich. It’s an ill wind in football that doesn’t blow the ball in someone’s direction.

Bolton fans join in

It wasn’t only in Manchester, Rochdale and Burnley that anti-United voices were heard complaining about all the coverage United were getting. For the three weeks up to the FA Cup Final the Bolton Evening News ran a succession of letters from Wanderers’ fans giving vent to their frustrations:

‘On Cup Final day I hope that Bolton will beat Manchester United to a frazzle…(I) shall be hoping for a blow that will shatter the prayers of the distinctly unhealthy and morbid sensation mongers whose sentimental partisanship is no more than a wallowing in momentary misery. I am afraid they will enjoy themselves anyway’ (Bolton Evening News18 April 1958).

‘I am really disgusted with the day-to-day sentiments expressed about Manchester United by the national press. If Bolton do win the papers will say they beat a poor team, but if they lose, the Munich to Wembley team will be toasted everywhere. All I can say is: ‘Carry on Bolton and get ‘em beat”. (Bolton Evening News 25 April)

The Labour leader on Bolton Council Ald. J. Vickers objected to the ‘disproportionate amount of publicity given by the press to Manchester United’, later adding that :

‘I thought the public were getting tired of all the tremendous amount of publicity concerning Manchester United…I hoped to see on Saturday not an emotional spectacle but rather 22 fit players giving a good game of football – with the best team winning’ (Bolton Evening News 30 April, 1958)

On the day, Bolton won the final 2-0, ending United’s Phoenix from the Ashes hopes in something of an anti-climax, even for those quietly exulting in the fact that the new Babes had finally go their come-uppance.

Blue Views: How United ‘exploited’ the Munich ‘thing’

It wasn’t only at the time of Munich that rival supporters complained about excessive emotion and ‘wallowing’ in the tragedy. It’s a theme that has popped up at regular intervals ever since. Take these comments directed at Reds around the time of the 45th anniversary of Munich in 2003, on a Manchester City website, Blue Views:

‘When are your club going to stop squeezing every last dollar out of that air crash?’

‘I don’t like the way they (Manchester United) ruthlessly prolonged and marketed the wave of sympathy that followed the Munich thing. You have to ask yourself honestly – did Man U benefit or suffer as a result of that air disaster?’

By the time these anti-Man U comments were posted online, United were well on the way to their eighth Premiership title under Sir Alex Ferguson, giving mooning blues yet more grief. If they didn’t like the alleged ‘marketing’ of sympathy over Munich, you can imagine how they must have felt about the unprecedented globalisation of the United brand then already under way on a huge scale, taking ‘Man U’ ever further afield to country after country.

With hindsight it’s clear that a very particular set of resentments against United had taken shape all that time ago.Beyond the persistent and vacuous ‘Munich’ songs, there is a broader hostility and jealousy which goes back a long way,sometimes bordering on genuine hatred. There have been several sources of this envy, each essentially going back decades, including United’s romantic but tragic history, plus their year-in-year-out reputation for flamboyant attacking football, their succession of household name stars, and their unrivalled popularity, now crossing all frontiers. The last two decades of success have only intensified the dislike, not created it. As Fergie said after the Reds had been pipped to the league title by Leeds in 1992:

‘There is a certain envy for Manchester United which made our task all that much more difficult. We know all about that kind of thing now…I don’t want people to weep crocodile tears for us but I find it difficult to understand why rivals should take so much satisfaction from someone’s downfall. It’s bitter and twisted but we will be ready for it next time. In fact we can use it to our advantage this season. It will be a cause for us, a rallying point to make sure we try even harder.’ (Six Years at United by Alex Ferguson, 1992)

The launch of the ABU Club in 1993

The master of ‘circle-the-wagons’ motivation, Alex Ferguson duly won United’s first league title for 26 years in the following season, 1992-93. This was their fifth major trophy in three years, and it prompted Irish broadcaster Des Cahill to launch the ‘Anyone But United’ Club’, spreading the ABU phenomenom far and wide. It gained much tacit support from United’s rivals everywhere, all those people happy see their own teams losing if it would help thwart United.

There was a genuine and widespread perception in the ’90s that United were arrogant, subject only to their own rules, and commercially rapacious beyond the reach of ‘smaller’ clubs, such as City, and hence the unacceptable face of the modern game. Certain players undoubtedly got under the skins of rival fans, especially Eric Cantona with his Gallic hauteur and upturned collar swagger, not to mention his extravagant match-winning skills. Then there was the visceral loathing for Fergie himself with his gum-chewing, stop-watch time-keeping and purple-faced will-to-win. No wonder people wanted any and everybody to beat United, anything to prevent United winning yet more silverware.It was the ‘mine enemy’s enemy is my friend’ philosophy applied full force.

The new movement had its own anthem, ‘Stand Up if You Hate Man U’, which got Chelsea chairman Ken Bates rising to his feet, even when United weren’t playing. Just as football can generate a sense of community and identity through support for your own team, it can also do so through its opposite, bonding together in hatred for an opponent.

Much of this United fans loved. We hadn’t had a hero like King Eric since the Sixties, and his puffed-out-chest, other-worldly charisma even struck a chord with non-football fans too, those who started mentioning ‘Man U’ to show how au fait they were with popular culture, often throwing in an ‘Ooh Aah Cantona’ for good measure. All this is inseparable from the way Sky Sports had turned football upside down, pouring in vast sums of money for live satellite coverage several times a week, transforming spectator habits everywhere, as pubs and sports bars became tiny stadiums full of baying crowds. You now didn’t ever have to attend a match to feel part of the action anywhere in the world where Premiership football was available, and soon that was pretty well everywhere. And it seems everywhere it went, so did the term ‘Man U’.

As the 1990s progressed, with the Reds piling up the trophies, including two Doubles, the ABU phenomenon spread ever further, even penetrating the international arena. England fans sometimes took more delight in singing anti-United songs than backing their own players, even when matches were played at Old Trafford and even when as many as seven United players were representing the country or when United players were scoring goals for England. Talking in 1998, Gary Neville ( another hate-object) described how he and his brother were repeatedly on the receiving end of this hostility in England shirts:

‘Phil and I went straight out to look at the Wembley pitch and were greeted by a chorus of ‘Stand Up if You Hate Man U’. We’d had this abuse before playing for England, but over the last year it’s got worse.’

By this time it was clear that the term Man U was taking on multiple meanings. It could be part of an anti-United rant, or it could be the trendily familiar term used by a doting middle-class mother whose six-year-old has got his first replica shirt. And all the while it was spreading right round the globe wherever English football was shown on TV, where it was more than a catchy point of recognition, it was a triumph of marketing.

Marketing Man U – ‘the oil-well’

Bearing all this in mind, it’s worth saying that an important and revealing feature of Red opposition to the term Man U stems from the fact that it has come to symbolise not just what some rival supporters hate about United, but also what genuine Reds dislike too, all that mega-store consumerism and obsession with ‘the brand’. Here’s what esteemed RoM regular ‘CedarsDevil’ had to say recently in a thread prompted by a Bloomberg article about United’s market dominance:

‘Biggest brand in sport, what the fuck next? Compete with Coca Cola? Better still have more branches than BurgerKing…Bloody stupid labelling…’

There are United fans who’d love to take the club back to the kind of down-to-earth institution it used to be, rooted in the working class communities of Stretford and Salford, not a leisure centre for the middle class ‘prawn sandwich brigade’ so memorably dismissed by cult hero Roy Keane. At times there has been an understandable backlash against the aggressive merchandising of the club as its expansionary plans are rolled out across the globe. For years there were endless complaints from fans about the high prices for replica shirts and how often the design was endlessly changed to maximise profits.

Already by 1996, the year of the Double Double, United were selling 850,000 replica shirts a year worldwide, a quarter of a million more than any other club in the UK and 350,000 more than any English club. It’s no wonder that Edward Freeman, ex-head of merchandising at Old Trafford, had this to say in Management Today in February 1999, when United were on course for their unique Treble:

‘It’s an oil-well. Up through the ground gurgles this lovely red & white gold. No-one’s quite sure how or why, but it seems to keep on coming…(It’s) a seven days a week, 52-weeks-of-the-year international sporting brand – a money printing machine’.

United’s chief executive Peter Kenyon (who later became the object of derision when he defected to Chelsea for bigger bucks) also waxed lyrical in Forbes magazine about United’s commercial prospects in July 2002, just prior to the start of another Premiership title-winning season:

‘Our growth potential is in internationalising the brand. We’ve already built Man U megastores in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur and we’ll soon open one in Bankok… We’ll begin opening a string of Red Cafes, in branded family restaurants, which are to spread all across Asia…’

In 2002 Vodaphone replaced United Club Call (to which I was embarrassingly addicted ) with ‘Man-U-Mobile’ as the club’s phone service, seemingly oblivious of some supporters’ dislike of the term, adding to the sense that the club was losing its soul.

However, while all this sort of thing provokes horror in some supporters, others are quietly proud that United attracts such remarkable levels of world-wide interest. In a certain light it can be seen as fulfilling Matt Busby’s visionary idealism for the expansion of international club football. Matt had insisted on taking United into the European Cup as champions in 1956-57 in the teeth of reactionary official opposition, but not just for short-term Red Devil glory, but to promote his longer-term aspirations for the future of the sport as a whole. Think what Matt would have thought about over 300 million people saying they support United – or Man U – from Manhattan to the land of California, and all points east. In fact that globalising process was already under way at the very end of Matt’s reign, in Scandinavia.

Our friends in the North

It’s not widely remembered that from 1969 Scandinavia had access to more English football matches live on television than we did in the UK, creating a knowledgeable and passionate audience for United. This growing popularity in that region must have delighted the ageing Busby, who will have surely viewed it as a vindication of his dream. Despite being in relative decline in the ’70s and ’80s ,United were the most-watched team in Scandinavia between 1971 and 1995, with around 70 matches covered live. (For those who like obscure facts, Scandinavian fans saw more goals scored by Mark Hughes in that period – seven- than by any other player, followed by McIlroy,McClair, Bruce, and Giggs with four each).

Leaving aside the (undoubtedly important) issues surrounding the current ownership of United by the Glazer family, and all that implies, the logic of Matt’s vision must surely be to celebrate much of what is happening today, when the whole world can be gripped by the drama and romance of supporting Manchester United, whether or not you choose to call them Man U .

Who could possibly begrudge anybody the intensity of experience conveyed in this report on the Champions League Final in 2008, from the Hindustan Times:

‘Soccer finals don’t get any bigger than this: Manchester United playing against Chelsea in the Champions League final in Moscow…but what struck beady-eyed us sitting here in ‘indoostan, glued to our tallies (sic)… was the sheer mixture of quality and high-octane entertainment provided. Television cameras beaming the match live to millions worldwide lingered lovingly on the fouls and the battered bodies, as well as on the goals and the subsequent faces. This was Jacobean theatre performed by the two English clubs full of a non-English dramatis personae. For us sitting here in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata or Bhatinda, cheering on either Man U or Chelsea might seem a tad strange to the guys in the bar at the Old Mancunian or Stag’s Head. It may seem odd.. to find Indians roaring in cheer or collapsing despair to the proceedings of a “European” tie. But as the gladiatorial spectacle evident from Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium in the wee hours of Wednesday night here showed , (Indian sports and media mogul) Lalit Modi and gang could pick up a tip or two about truly globalising a spectator sport.’ (Quoted in ‘Nemanja Vidic – Captain Fantastic, by Frank Worrall , 2011)

I’ll still say United, but you can say Man U

Whether I have really got to the bottom of the Man U issue I’m not sure, but I hope I have shown just how complex and multi-layered the whole thing is. I suspect Man U will remain the term of choice for millions of fans round the world, who’ll have no qualms about it, while a stubborn rump of self-styled traditionalists in the UK will continue to poor scorn on its branding superficiality, just as envious rivals will continue to exhort everyone to ‘Stand Up if You Hate Man U’ till kingdom comes.

As for myself, I would as soon name my wife Mrs Blatter as call Manchester United Man U, but today I would never tell anyone what to call our club. The last time I did that I came to regret it deeply.

I used to correspond by email with an elderly, rather lonely American who was mad about sport, including soccer. Bob was a former student of my late father-in-law and he’d worked in the theatre and also at the US Space Agency, putting into clear English all the technical jargon for ground-crews preparing to launch manned rockets into space.This was a man who cared about language and was quick to grasp its nuances and subtleties. He’d become a big fan of United, hardly missing a match on satellite TV in San Diego, continually enthusing over David Beckham’s crosses and Wayne Rooney’s bulldog Britishness. He used to ask me all sorts of questions about the history of the club, which I’d answer in much the way I have contributed to the RoM site in recent times, and he was always very appreciative and encouraging in return.Then one day he happened to use the dread term ‘Man U’ once too often, as most Americans do without a second’s thought. I reacted badly, telling him ‘real United supporters’ would never use such a term. I could tell from his crestfallen response that I’d rather hurt his feelings, making him feel that I didn’t ultimately accept him as a true supporter, just because he was an American and because he hadn’t got the correct lingo. I immediately realised my mistake and tried to reassure him on the matter, but I never fully succeded. Sadly Bob was taken seriously ill not long after this stupid exchange and he died a few months later, without me ever quite getting him to feel he was still part of the worldwide United family.

That’s why you’ll never again find me telling someone, ‘real supporters don’t call Manchester United ‘Man U’ ‘

Booknote

Here I want to acknowledge my debt to a series of essays in an academic collection called ‘Manchester United – A Thematic Study, edited by David L. Andrews, published in 2004. I am particularly appreciative of Gavin Mellor’s chapter ‘We hate the Manchester Club like poison’ which I have drawn on extensively, especially his important and detailed research into the early reaction to Munich, one of the best things I’ve read on the subject. I have also taken quotes from Kirsten Rosaaen & John Amis’s excellent ‘From the Busby Babes to the Theatre of Dreams’. There are several other valuable contributions such as the chapter by Bo Reimer on Scandinavian United supporters and I recommend the book if you’re not too easily put off by academic language, or indeed by Professor Toby Miller of New York University’s continual reference to Man U.

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Why Saying ‘Man U’ Isn’t So Bad… Part I

‘Why the fuck are we called Man U, for fuck sake, it’s United you dicks.’

One RoM regular has referred to our name being ‘desecrated’ by the use of ‘Man U’ and asks, ‘How hard is it to type Man United? It’s only 5 more letters.’

People often ask me what I think so I decided to explore precisely what’s at stake, hoping to pin down why feelings run quite so high on this apparently pointless divergence within United’s far-flung phantom empire. Of course I have my own views on the subject, as I regularly point out to my wife, but I must admit I have been surprised by how elusive the whole issue turns out to be, even on seemingly obvious questions. On the other hand, as I peered into Manchester United’s past through this tiny linguistic prism it has been surprisingly pleasureable to see the sheer richness of the landscape revealed. That’s why I hope you’ll bear with me on this somewhat meandering journey along the long and winding road of United lore.

But first, let’s start with a little historical quiz. What do the following all have in common?

2-8 November 1951: England team list in ‘Sport’ magazine, naming several Manchester United players.

27 April 1952: Football results column in the ‘Sunday Pictorial’, when Matt Busby’s United defeated Arsenal 6-1 to secure the club’s first league title for 41 years.

1 February 1958: The Arsenal v Manchester United match-day programme for what turned out to be the Busby Babes’ last domestic appearance before the Munich Air Crash five days later. (United won 5-4, of course, in a pulsating match dominated by the Herculean Duncan Edwards.)

26 March 1960: The Fulham programme for the first time I saw United, when Dennis Viollet scored twice in a 5-0 win to set the United record for league goals in a season, still unbroken.

15 September 1963: ‘Sunday Mirror’ match-report scoreline when George Best made his debut in a 1-0 victory against West Bromwich Albion.

7 May 1967: ‘Sunday Mirror’ report when United beat West Ham 6-1 to clinch Matt Busby’s fifth and final league title.

Got it? The correct answer is of course that in each case the abbreviation ‘Man U’ was used, with not a peep of ‘for fuck sake’ protest from anyone.

So what’s going on? Why has an expression used uncontroversially – even honourably – decades ago suddenly become so contentious?

Following the paper trail

When I was a kid growing up in the 1950s it was absolutely routine to see the term ‘Man U’ in print, particularly in the tabloids and populist broad-sheets. It was a space-saving device and you’d find it mainly in the football results and league tables alongside other abbreviations such as WBA, QPR, Man C, Sheff U, Sheff W and so on. You’d also see it when international teams were announced, a player’s club affiliation being placed in brackets after his name, just like today. Then it often popped up in the ‘Stop Press’ or ‘Late News’ column which would be left blank for last minute updates, especially in local evening papers.The Man U abbreviation also began appearing in the scoreline above match reports, as in the Quiz examples. And finally, when I first began attending matches at the end of the decade, programmes often used the term as well, not on the front or team sheet page but tucked away in the small print of the fixture list and league table.

Knowing all this, I wanted to find out when the term first came into use. So I trawled through books such as ‘Manchester United – A History since 1909′ and Stephen F Kelly’s invaluable ‘Back Page United’, plus my own scrapbooks and haphazard piles of yellowing cuttings. From these sources it became clear that it took quite a while before the fully stripped-down term became commonplace.

In the 1920s, for example, the most common shorthand was ‘Manchester U’, although the ‘News of the World’ was already using ‘Man Un’ as early as 1940 while the ‘Sunday Dispatch’ rather clumsily put ‘M’nchester U’ in 1946. Gradually in the late 1940s the now-predominant abbreviations ‘Man United’ and ‘Man Utd’ took hold, as seen on supporters’ hats at the 1948 Cup Final. These terms have since always been deployed far more frequently than ‘Man U’ and to this day ‘Man United’ is still what you’ll hear spoken by such Old Trafford luminaries as Sir Bobby Charlton, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes and David Beckham, just as it is by countless fans. On the other hand, I am not aware of either Sir Matt Busby or Sir Alex Ferguson ever using any of these shorthands.

Meanwhile, ‘Man U’ appeared with growing frequency in the early 1960s, particularly in the mass-circulation Daily and Sunday Mirror, the leading tabloids of the day. I can also point to plenty of examples from other papers such as the Daily Mail, The People, the News Chronicle and Daily Herald, all of which show conclusively that there was absolutely nothing problematic or provocative about printing ‘Man U’ in those days.

However, here I would stress two things. First, throughout that period 50 or 60 years ago, I can find no examples of journalists using ‘Man U’ within the main body of an article. Second, I have no memory whatsoever of anyone in the early ’50s who actually said ‘Man U’ in conversation. I believe it was at first an almost entirely written phenomenon, largely relegated to the small-print sections of newspapers and programmes. It seems to have caught on only slowly as a spoken expression, in an almost underground way in the more informal Sixties, without ever being particularly pushed by the media.

Nevertheless, I should here admit that others remember things differently. That’s because even among supremely knowledgeable Reds there is no real agreement about where and when people started saying ‘Man You’ in the modern way. All sorts of different explanations get put forward, none shedding much light on why people get so het up about it.

Did ‘Man U’ start at the movies?

On the basic question of chronology, one of the most interesting suggestions is the claim that the term ‘Man U’ was spoken as early as the 1950s in the cinema. It has been said that ‘the rot’ – if such it is – started in the old Pathe Gazette Newsreels which used to appear between the main feature and the ‘B’ movie. For some of my pals with no interest in politics or the doings of royalty this was the time to grab a choc ice or Orange Maid lolly, but for me there was always the hope of catching some fleeting shots of soccer stars such as Stanley Matthews or Billy Wright.

We used to go to ‘the pictures’ almost every week in the Regent Cinema in Amersham or the Embassy in Chesham in the ’50s, and I loved seeing the top sports stories of the day on the vast shimmering screen. As with many other youngsters, this would have been my first real exposure to top footballers in action and it was exhilarating to gaze up at these gods so dramatically magnified in scale. In some cities there were even dedicated Newsreel Theatres screening these news compilations on a loop, usually changing three times a week. They were the antecedants of today’s TV news.

I’ve no doubt the cinema, far more than TV, did an enormous amount to spread the word nationally about Matt Busby’s fine attacking, free-scoring Manchester United teams in the late ’40s and 1950s, an under-appreciated aspect of the club’s rise to wider prominence.The Busby Babes excited crowds wherever they played, pioneering European football in 1956-57 whilst also tilting for the first domestic League & Cup Double of the 20th Century, and Pathe cameras were present for many of the key encounters.

However, despite the undoubted importance of this first phase in the ‘nationalisation’ of Manchester United I had my doubts about the likelihood of anyone referring to the team as ‘Man U’ at that time. It would surely have been out of keeping with the Pathe house style, which had a certain tweed-jacket, pipe-smoker ‘establishment’ quality, giving events a portentous, almost epic quality at times through the rich tonality of the narration.

This was shown at its best in the Pathe coverage of the Munich Air Crash on 6 February, 1958, which caused the deaths of 23 people. The grainy, achingly sad scenes of snow whipping across the wrecked aircraft fuselage lying on the runway have been used in almost every modern documentary on the subject.The commentator speaks with hushed restraint as he names those United players who had been killed and those who survived, such as the fatally injured 21-year-old Duncan Edwards.It was the same with the reports from the Rechts der Isar hospital over the following weeks, when everything was treated with tact and sensitivity. Pathe were there again as United rose from the ashes to win the improbable series of emotion-charged FA Cup ties that took the team to Wembley again, beating Sheffield Wednesday, WBA and Fulham on the way.

All this I knew, and I was reasonably conversant with both the classic Babes footage and the post-Munich match coverage. Nevertheless I decided to view as many Pathe Newsreels as possible to check for myself that somehow ‘Man U’ hadn’t surprisingly slipped through as claimed, perhaps in some breathless piece of narration over shots of the players in action.

Pathe News: historic United footage

Both Pathe and their rivals Movietone tried to replicate the style of live-action sporting commentary of the kind already familiar to BBC radio listeners. Match footage was shot on big cumbersome 35mm tripod film cameras, and it would have been far too expensive to film the whole game just for a brief report so they would gamble on capturing the best bits, guessing when a move might end in a goalscoring opportunity, hoping to catch the vital moments. If they were lucky they would add the excitable ‘and it’s a goal!’ later in a dubbing theatre.

As I trawled through You Tube and Pathe’s own archive I was astonished by just how many newsreels featured United. It’s a wonder no-one has made more use of this brilliant black & white treasure trove of United film going back to at least the 1930s.

There are surprising treats such as matches from United’s classic FA Cup run in 1948, including the Aston Villa, Charlton and Derby County ties plus the Final itself at Wembley against Blackpool ( the first United match covered live on TV by the BBC). Then there are unexpected gems such as United beating Leeds 4-0 and Arsenal 1-0 in the Cup in 1951, with Stan Pearson getting a hat-trick in the first match and the winner in the second.

One oddity is a report by Universal, a Pathe competitor, covering a rather embarrassing 7-1 defeat by Tottenham Hotspur in an exhibition match in the Yankee Stadium, New York, in 1952, when United were Champions. The narration is by an American who calls the fans ‘boosters’ and refers to the United players as ‘the Manchester Uniteds’. For fuck sake.

There are several Pathe reports from around 1957 featuring the famous footage of the Busby Babes, including the 1957 FA Cup Final when the Double hopes were dashed by Aston Villa. I was also pleased to find rip-roaring action from the two legs of the Cup Winner’s Cup in 1964 when United knocked out the holders Tottenham under atmospheric floodlights.There was even newsfilm I’d never seen before of an FA Cup match I’d attended myself at Old Trafford in 1968 with my Spurs fan brother Chris, when a late Tottenham equaliser made it 2-2 on the day. To make it worse, Spurs won the replay, highlights of which I remember seeing on TV.

Having now seen most if not all of these wonderful old Pathe Newsreels featuring United I am sure no-one ever used the term Man U, either in commentary or in a caption.

But do look for yourself. Who cares if they say ‘Man U’? These are irreplaceable pieces of United history, in triumph and tragedy, and it’s marvellous that we are able to access them so easily.

Soccer as social history

For me those lustrous black & white pictures are tremendously evocative, reminding me forcefully just how much football has changed in my lifetime. The thing that strikes one immediately is how battered and worn those old ‘mudbath’ pitches were compared with today’s carefully manicured surfaces.Then there are the mountainous crowds packed together on the steep all-standing terraces with little or no cover from wind and rain. These heaving, seething, broiling masses of supporters always seem swathed in industrial fog or cigarette smoke, or both. Then there’s the drab uniformity of the massed ranks pressed together, especially in those early post-war Austerity years, when everyone seems to wear flat caps, trilbys and ill-fitting ‘de-mob’ suits. It’s all gaunt faces and scrawny bodies, spectators and players alike. No need then to enquire, ‘Who ate all the pies?’

When you see these fans in close-ups there is more individuality and character of course, amidst the bony faces and bad teeth, which betray harsh working lives of endurance and deprivation. Archive film like this is an invaluable resource for social historians, showing if nothing else how much health has improved since the creation of the NHS in 1948, the year of Busby’s first trophy.

These newsreels straddle my own childhood and capture what football was like when I first went to games at the end of the 50s, although gazing nostalgically at these old films today that seems almost impossible to believe. Everything is so very, very different now. Yet I can still somehow identify with the grinning schoolboys in caps and belted macs caught in crowd scene cutaways, so vital for film editors trying to assemble a credible sequence from discontinuous, unlinked action shots. Not that I ever wore my school cap to see United, especially that first time in 1960. After all, I had skived off early from school that day.

‘Famous Football Teams at Home No 4: Manchester United’ (1936)

One of my favourite discoveries in the Pathe archive was a short item from 14th December 1936 entitled ‘Famous Football Teams at Home No 4: Manchester United’. It’s a bit surprising to find United featuring so early in the series, given their perennial yo-yo status in the 20s and 30s and sure enough, they were relegated again at the end of this season, 1936-37, having only just come up the year before.

There are remarkable pictures of the United players training and then we see their faces in close up, mostly unrecognisable but strikingly similar to any other working class men from that Depression era decade. These craggy-featured players could easily be coal miners, steel-workers or shipyard welders.There’s a similar story on Manchester City ‘at home’ with a portrait shot of Matt Busby, not long before he left to join Liverpool, looking very smart and controlled, with slicked-down, centre-parted hair, a commanding presence even then.

As I listened to the narration to this 1936 report, ears cocked for a possible ‘Man U’ (none to be heard), I was suddenly taken back to a forgotten part of my childhood. It was the use of a phrase I hadn’t heard for years, now long passed out of use: ‘the United’. That’s how some supporters would refer to United not just when I was a kid, but way back over a century ago. In the same way as today some might say ‘Man U’, then it was ‘the United’.

There’s only one t’ United

I first really became aware of this convention when I began supporting the team after Munich, especially when I started attending matches and would hear genuine Mancunians talking. It was brought home to me in September 1960, after I’d just seen Tottenham trounce United 4-1 at White Hart Lane, on their way to the first Double of the 20th Century. As I have described before, I fainted in the Underground after the match (heat, lack of food, hours of standing, disappointment) and collapsed onto the platform at Euston. A kindly old United supporter checked to see if I was OK and he ended up giving me a whole bag full of pre-Munich programmes, photos, cuttings and – most generous of all – several Babe autographs, including that of my hero Duncan Edwards (who I’d never actually seen play). I felt very strongly even then that he was passing on a kind of sacred trust to me with these ‘Holy Relics’. Hearing that Pathe voice-over from 1936 refer to ‘the United’ brought back to me the fact that this sad-eyed old gentleman at Euston had done the same.

It must have been around that time that I sometimes adopted a respectful but none the less entirely fake Manc accent and would talk about ‘t’United’, which would come out as a sort of strangulated ‘chunited’, which my brother would mock in evermore ‘eeh by gum’ stage-Northerner tones. A bit like middle class kids going all Gangsta today, I suppose. Boys will be boyz.

‘The United’ in the Golden Age

Having been reminded of my own ‘t’United’ heritage I began looking for its use historically. In fact it goes back to the very beginnings in 1902, when the club’s name was changed from the original Newton Heath to Manchester United. A few years ago the BBC got hold of what is believed to be the oldest footage of a United match, a 2-0 away win against Burnley from that first season under the new name. The researchers noticed in newspapers that the team was referred to as ‘the United, better known as Newton Heath’. This then became a regular – though never exclusive – term in United’s first Golden Age.

August 1908: In those early days there was a popular sports paper called ‘Athletic News’ which covered United extensively before and after World War 1 and they frequently used the tag, ‘the United’. Here’s their report on United’s 4-0 replay victory against Queens Park Rangers in the inaugural Charity Shield in 1908, after United had won their first league title:

‘In the spring the Rangers and the United were on an equality. On Saturday the United showed football justifying their title (as Champions)’ . (Athletic News, 31 August 1908)

April 1909: In the following year United won the FA Cup for the first time, beating Bristol City 1-0. The ‘Daily Mirror’ covered the match, noting that:

‘The Manchester men knew that Bristol had won three out of four league points from the United.’ (Daily Mirror, April 26, 1909)

April 1911: Another now defunct sports paper, ‘The Umpire’ had a long report when United won the League for the second time in three years in April 1911, beating Sunderland 5-1 at Old Trafford, under the headline:

‘MANCHESTER UNITED CHAMPIONS: Bravo, United!‘

The report by ‘The General’ was peppered with references to ‘the United’:

‘The United turned out without Hofton….the United defenders showed great form…The United had terribly bad luck… The Wearsiders were working manfully to keep the United out…The United had the better of the game…the United had several chances…’ (The Umpire, 30 April, 1911)

September 1911: When ‘the United’ beat Swindon 8-4 at Stamford Bridge to win their second Charity Shield with Harold Halse scoring six goals , the Mirror was there again to cover the match:

‘…Tout scored with a fast low shot, making the score only 4-3 at halftime in favour of the United…Five minutes from the finish Wall scored the eighth goal for the United…’ (Daily Mirror, 26 September, 1911)

‘The United’ enters the history books

So, it’s very clear that the term ‘the United’ appeared fairly regularly in those early glory days (unlike ‘Man U’ which doesn’t surface at all), and the practice carried on well into the inter-war period. ‘Jacques’ of the Athletic News often used it in the 1920s and we’ve seen it already in Pathe’s Newsreel in 1936.

Closer to our own times you can also find the phrase ‘the United’ still just about in use in the Official History of Manchester United, written in 1948 by the Red-supporting journalist Alf Clarke of the ‘Manchester Evening Chronicle’, who was one of the eight reporters who tragically lost their lives at Munich. This slim but invaluable booklet cost one shilling and was the first detailed history of the club, prompted by Matt Busby’s team winning the FA Cup that year for the first time since 1909.

Alf gives charming, somewhat folksy accounts of several key moments in United’s chequered history, in some cases passing on stories which would otherwise have remained unrecorded and it’s noticeable that, alongside the more common use of ‘United’ he occasionally drops back into the old style, which had a certain ‘respectable’ working class formality about it. I’ll give just one example, partly to keep the memory alive of one of the few United ‘greats’ of the grim inter-war years.

Alf liked talking about his favourite United players, many of whom were personal friends, and he was a particular fan of one of the greatest goalscorers United have ever had, Joe Spence, who joined the club in 1919, having served as a machine gunner in World War 1. Known for the terrace cry of ‘Give it to Joe’, Spence played for United for 14 seasons, making a then record 510 appearences and scoring 168 goals, all at a time when the team was struggling on and off the pitch. As Alf says, with powerful understatement:

‘What a great servant he was to the United’. (Official History of Manchester United, 1948)

(In passing I’d just flag up that phrase, ‘a great servant’, which is still used today when players like Paul Scholes or Gary Neville are discussed. I’ve always disliked its Victorian master-servant overtones, although it certainly fitted the position of footballers before the abolition of the maximum wage in 1961).

By 1948, when Alf Clarke was writing his history, it was already increasingly rare to find ‘the United’ in print so it rather stuck out when I heard it used in the commentary for the Pathe reports on United’s FA Cup defeats of Leeds and Arsenal in 1951. It already sounded a little quaint.

Nevertheless, it was nice to find another quote from a few years later showing that Manchester City were sometimes referred to in a similar, slightly archaic fashion.This is what Dennis Viollet, who grew up a City fan, said after he’d scored the winner in a tense 1-0 local derby victory in October 1956 (on the way to the Babes’ second successive league title):

‘I’ve nothing against the City but I’d rather score against them than against anybody.’ (The Red Devils: FA Cup Souvenir, 1957).

Finally, one last, rather touching little example of this use of ‘the United’, which I found in the 1958 Supporter’s Club Handbook, for the season following Munich. There I spotted an advert from a raincoat company, appropriately enough in Newton Heath, simply wishing, ‘SUCCESS TO THE UNITED’.

The end of the ‘Pathe Years’

It’s revealing to see how these verbal traditions persisted for decades, through a period when support for ‘the United’ still largely came from cohesive communities clustered around Manchester’s factories,engineering works and textile mills. There were few differences in culture and life-style between players and supporters and perhaps even reporters as everyone spoke in more-or-less in the same way, in what remained an overwhelmingly working class sport. Fans were generally locals, some of whom went to Maine Road to see ‘the City’ one week and Old Trafford the next.

But well before the end of what we might call ‘the Pathe Years’ (they folded in 1970), there were destabilising social upheavals which transformed the face of Britain, and hence the lives of the great mass of football supporters. The Sixties saw a heady mixture of ‘You’ve never had it so good’ consumerism, ‘permissive’ youth culture, ‘Get offa my cloud’ rock rebelliousness, and momentous struggles for equality and liberation, all against the backdrop of declining industrial communities with their ‘tribal’ loyalties. Taken together with the gradual ‘nationalisation’ of support for Manchester United in the 1950s , massively intensified by Munich, these changes had an enormous impact on the nature of support for the club, including the language used by fans all over the country, a process accelerated when TV coverage of football expanded in the Sixties.

Did they say ‘Man U’ on TV?

It is around this period, with United both growing in popularity and yet simultaneously attracting ever more bitter envy from supporters of rival clubs which could never match or compete with the United mythology and romantic appeal, that the somewhat populist tag, ‘Man U’ really started to take hold in popular discourse, certainly in private conversation. It has been claimed by the highly regarded Tom Clare no less (he’s written extensively on United’s past as a longtime supporter going back to the Fifties) that it was on ITV that the dread term first gained wider currency. He exonerates the BBC, who could be expected to have higher standards.

And so it’s to television we must turn next to check whether people really did say ‘Man U’ on television. Is Tom Clare right?

The first live TV coverage of ‘Manchester’

In these days of multi-channel saturation coverage of football from all round the world, it’s hard to convey just how different things were when I was a kid. Then there was only the one BBC public service channel until 1955 when ITV was launched to break the monopoly, funded purely by advertising. There was virtually no live TV coverage of club football apart from the FA Cup Final and, much later, occasional European Cup matches. Even recorded highlights were on a very limited scale, not much more that a couple of matches a week.

We’ve seen that the first live coverage of a United match was the 1948 FA Cup Final, after which there was nothing more on the BBC for nine whole years, until United reached the Cup Final again in May 1957, against Aston Villa.

I have listened carefully to the whole TV commentary for that final by Ken ‘They think it’s all over’ Wolstenholme, constantly reminding myself that this is the only TV recording available of a complete Busby Babes match and that the team was the youngest ever to grace an FA Cup Final. I can thus say with conviction that our Ken certainly never refers to ‘Man U’. In fact he hardly even uses the word United. Instead he consistently refers to ‘Manchester’, as when chiding the United fans for booing Peter McParland after he’d smashed goalkeeper Ray Woods’ cheekbone with a reckless charge early on, reducing United to ten men for most of the match. In those pre-sub days, Villa won 2-1, ending United’s hopes of the first Double of the 20th century.

Meanwhile ITV covered a United match live for the first time shortly before that Cup Final defeat, Granada cameras being present at Old Trafford for the European Cup semi-final second leg against Real Madrid in April 1957. United drew 2-2 to lose 5-3 on aggregate, ending their chance of an unprecedented Treble, only achieved 42 years later.

TV Highlights before Match of the Day

The BBC had various programmes from the early 1950s, such as Sports Special, Saturday Sport and Sportsview which would have recorded highlights of football matches, usually not more than two matches per Saturday.Before the introduction of Ampex video tape in the late ’50s, the action was shot entirely on ‘telerecording’ 16mm film capturing the pictures direct from the big electronic ‘pedestal’ Outside Broadcast cameras, which explains the relatively poor quality. The film had to be rushed in relays by despatch riders to labs in London to be processed, accompanied by shot-list ‘dope sheets’ to assist rapid editing. There was so little time the edited footage would then be transmitted in negative, ‘reverse-phased’ electronically by the ‘telecine’ machine to give the correct black & white pictures. Wolstenholme would introduce these 15-minute highlights from a studio in London, where he cheerfully smoked cigarettes while the match was going out, casually using an ash-tray hidden beneath his desk.

With all these Sports shows, there were perennial complaints that the BBC favoured Southern clubs at the expense of the North, vigorously denied. It has been claimed that the first time United were featured at Old Trafford was only as late as August 1957 against Leicester City. To put this in context, by that time the Busby Babes had been Champions in both of the previous two seasons.

Personally I have fond memories of Sports Special when we first got a TV around ’58 , getting early glimpses of my first great heroes, Munich survivors Harry Gregg, Bill Foulkes and Bobby Charlton and others favourites such as Dennis Viollet and Albert Quixall. Needless to say, I have no memory of whether the commentators ever said ‘Man U’.

Match of the Day launched in 1964

Gradually the pressure increased for more football on TV, leading eventually to the launch of Match of the Day in 1964, initially somewhat hesitantly on the relatively new channel, BBC2, before the success of the show saw it move to progressively better slots on BBC1. It became one of the ‘signature’ series in the BBC’s Saturday night schedules, persuading parents to let kids stay up late and drawing adults out of pubs early. These shows helped make the reputation of the great teams of the era, not just Busby’s United but also Bill Shankly’s Liverpool or Don Revie’s Leeds. It was no surprise that soon ITV were trying to compete for this growing armchair audience with The Big Match in London and regional variants elsewhere, must-see shows screened on otherwise insufferably dull Sunday afternoons, when almost everything was closed under Lord’s Day Observance legislation, only repealed in the 1980s.

United as Showbiz

Shows like this also made household names of even journeymen footballers and magnified the star quality of the very best players, such as Charlton, Denis Law and inevitably,’the Fifth Beatle’,George Best, not to mention the great characters of the game like Nobby Stiles, so beloved by the casual fan after his role in helping England win the World Cup in 1966, which itself had a massive impact on the popularity of football.

Football was getting drawn ever closer to the centre of popular culture as a branch of showbiz, when Saturday night audiences could pick-and-choose who their favourite team might be, often with scant regard for locality or traditional loyalty. There is no doubt that countless thousands of TV viewers all over the UK, many of whom perhaps never saw the Reds in the flesh, were drawn by the mystique, the romance, the glory and – crucially – the tragic past – of Manchester United, especially as Matt Busby went in search of the ‘Holy Grail’ , winning the European Cup in memory of those who died at Munich.

Knowing that my friends would sometimes say ‘Man U’ by this time in casual conversation, I couldn’t resist checking as many old Match of the Days and Big Match recordings as I could access online. The results were mixed.Of course it’s an impossible task to see every United match covered by ITV, or indeed MoD, so all I can say is that having viewed a considerable number of both, I have not found a single reference to ‘Man U’, either spoken or in a caption.

Liverpool’s famous perch

I’m not saying Tom Clare is wrong, but I am saying I can’t confirm that he’s right, although I had tremendous fun on the way, that’s for sure, re-living matches I attended or watching goals I’d long forgotten. On all sides, commentators refer to ‘United’, even Wolstenholme dropping his ‘Manchester’. Quite early on, in the mid-60s, you see on-screen captions saying, ‘Man United’ on the BBC but it’s not until well into the 1980s that I found ITV’s much loved Brian Moore referring to ‘Man United’ in commentary, for example in the brilliant FA Cup semi-final replay in 1985 when United beat the mighty Liverpool 2-1 in a Titanic clash decided by goals from Mark Hughes and Bryan Robson. What a great match, what a fabulous result at a time when Liverpool were still infuriatingly secure on their ‘fucking perch’. (I wonder what they have done with that famous perch, now they no longer need it. Perhaps it’s tucked away at the back of the legendary Anfield Boot Room.)

Shock Horror: Spelling mistakes on Match of the Day

As I happily trawled through these old recordings, I noticed oddments, such as Tommy Docherty using the phrase ‘early doors’ in January 1976, in an interview after United had beaten Birmingham 3-1. It’s usually said that, as applied to sport, this was one of many additions to the football phrasebook by former United manager Ron Atkinson, in his pre-disgrace ITV co-commentator days.

I also found a few things that I found mildly shocking, as an old BBC hand myself. I recall rightly getting quite a ticking-off from the managing director when a programme from my department in the 1990s had an apostrophe in the wrong place on a caption, so it was a real surprise to see spelling mistakes at least four times on Match of the Day in the mid-’60s, back in the good old days when standards were supposedly so much higher.

On three separate occasions Match of the Day had captions mis-spelling the name of that very fine Irish full-back, Seamus Brennan, rendering it ‘Brennen’ on each occasion ( against Spurs at home, Notts Forest away and Arsenal away in ’64/65). Even more surprisingly, they even got the name wrong for former England captain, Johnny Haynes, calling him ‘Haines’ for Fulham v United in 1964.

To be fair, those captions were difficult to alter in those pre-digital days, being large cumbersome pieces of black card on which names were rather crudely pasted in white letters and then placed on a caption stand in front of a camera, the image being ‘supered’ over the obligatory wide-shot of the stadium. (I remember the cap stand process well from my first BBC series in 1969, re-creating 18th Century life in a National Trust stately home using an OB Unit more used to covering Match of the Day. They loved the very different task of bringing to life how people lived upstairs / downstairs two hundred years ago, based on my researches. The crew wanted to talk history, I wanted Match of the Day gossip).

Anyway, the TV folks may have cocked up the occasional name caption, but I found no evidence that either BBC or ITV commentators were behind the popularisation of ‘Man U’.

Conclusion

So, to conclude, we know beyond any doubt that the popular press used the abbreviation Man U from at least the early 1950s, without any complaint or controversy. It is also reasonably clear that the term gradually entered the vocabulary of ordinary football supporters by the early Sixties at the very latest, picked up from the press but without any significant boost from either cinema or television. This was a slow, underground, word-of-mouth phenomenon, very possibly started by United fans themselves, unpalatable as that might be to some today.

Having got the basic chronology more or less straight, we still haven’t got to the heart of why significant numbers of Manchester United supporters today feel so strongly about a term which had such prosaic origins over half a century ago. Nor does any of it explain why opposing fans take such delight in baiting Reds with taunts based around the term.

In Part 2 we will resume our quest by looking at the notorious song about Duncan Edwards which is often cited as the reason why we should not use the term Man U. That’s a view not shared by all United fans however, despite its agreed status as one of the earliest examples of the despicable genre of ‘Munich’ chants, but we will also look at how it relates to that other anti-United favourite, ‘Stand Up if You Hate Man U!’

There’s obvious truth in parts of that (probably not the bit about chocolate coins… or the belt) but I honestly think it does him a disservice. It kind of aligns itself to the hairdryer narrative of the ferocious competitor dragging his charges mercilessly to victory. The script was the same when Wenger and Fergie were locking horns in the nineties. The former was portrayed as cultured and debonair; the latter as an old school disciplinarian. In reality SAF is the far more rounded of the two with plenty of interests outside of the sport. Arsene was very much the football geek.

If it was all about being ‘driven’ and ‘gay’ for success (I paraphrase) why has Roy Keane’s management career proved such a disappointment? Here was a player very much in his manager’s image, who had plenty time to learn from the best. He is just as uncompromising and committed, and just as scornful of decent efforts and plucky runners up. But Keano’s überferg approach to management didn’t work. Being a toxic leader to those poor souls genuinely unable to achieve in a way he found so routine destroyed rather than made stronger.

But that’s the thing about perfectionism – it’s not always a positive thing. It can be a disease. Having an unquenchable desire to succeed upon success is born from dissatisfaction. A win is a win but when it’s done it’s gone – and it’s never enough. Worse for a pathological perfectionist is if victory never comes. Or stops coming. It can not only ruin a team and harm a club, but also crush the man. If you measure your worth in silver, how do you cope with a bare cabinet?

For me Sir Alex’s greatest managerial achievement has been managing himself. Anger and siege mentality are hardly conducive to longevity. Over his 25 glorious years at United not all have been glorious. He must have experienced desperate lows and private self-doubt in his first few years at the helm. And even once the honours starting to gush forth and multiply, there were significant troughs to punctuate the many peaks. He has never crumbled under the immense weight of his own expectations or succumbed to narcissistic rage or injury. Nor has he simply thrown money at every problem or succumbed to the vanity of playing pretty potless football like some of his contemporaries.

Contrary to the catatonic caricature, Fergie has remained temperate throughout. He has treated success and relative failure with a reserve that would make Kipling proud. Whatever keeps him restful and energetic away from football – be it holidaying in France, the wine, horse-breeding, the wine, learning to play the piano, or indeed the wine – it seems to be working.

Over the last quarter of a century, he’s been extremely patient and shrewd, and always incredibly pragmatic (some would say too pragmatic in recent years, but hey – that’s for any day!). Even his famous outbursts and tirades seem increasingly tactical and calculated, often used to make a point or distract attention away from another story. It’s all about control – of the media, the players and the story. And always himself.

Love him or loathe him, he is an incredible man. Not for his fire or his fury, but for his wit and intelligence. Above all else, he is a very canny Scot. It helps make him the best manager in the history of the game. Sir Matt Busby created the Manchester United we now take for granted – the style, the ethos, the glamour – no one can compete with that. But Fergie has provided all the success and glory Busby must have dreamed of. For that, we and generations to follow must be eternally grateful.

Now if he’d only sort out the midfield…