On Tuesday night I was in Manchester to watch Mike D of the Beastie Boys perform at the Albert Hall. Not the one in London, obviously. Manchester’s Albert Hall, a venue perhaps better known these days for Bingo Bongo. Michael Diamond is now 60 years old. Sixty. That’s a genuinely frightening thought, particularly in Halloween week. It seems like only yesterday he was fighting for his right to party. Now he’s probably fighting for his right to a decent pension. Bloody nostalgia.
Talking of, before the gig, I popped into the Nags Head for a pint. It was the first time I’d been in there when it wasn’t a matchday, and the place was practically deserted. Which gave me a rare opportunity to properly examine the memorabilia covering the walls, rather than trying to see it through the back of someone’s head while balancing a pint. There’s plenty of George Best stuff in there, naturally. And it got me thinking nostalgically again. As the mighty United were slated to play Chelsea on the Saturday, it got me thinking how Best always seemed to turn it on against Chelsea (apart from when he missed the train and stayed with Sinead Cusack instead). Perhaps it was the proximity to Carnaby Street, the celebrities in the crowd, or the opportunity to show off in front of London’s beautiful people. Whatever it was, Chelsea seemed to bring something special out of him.
For 45 minutes on Saturday lunchtime, it looked as though Chelsea had brought something special out of this United side too. I know. Ridiculous, isn’t it? After the unrelenting misery of October, here we were, playing some decent football. Little triangles. Players passing to teammates rather than opponents. Movement off the ball. Chances being created. Chelsea, at times, genuinely on the ropes. We had nine shots in the first half. Nine! In some recent games we’ve barely managed nine coherent passes. Amad Diallo could have had a hat-trick on his own. Bruno Fernandes, Matheus Cunha and Bryan Mbeumo all had presentable opportunities. Cunha even put the ball in the net, only for VAR to spoil the party. Chelsea had one ruled out too, in a wonderfully open game that seemed, for a while, to belong to another era.
Nostalgia, it’s a killer eh? I made the mistake that every United supporter makes at some point: I allowed myself to feel optimistic. Perhaps we’d turned a corner. Perhaps Carrick had found something. Perhaps the players had remembered they were supposed to be professional footballers, not just ghosts of a previous era, when football, United, and Mike D were young and courageous and triumphant (to be fair Mike D still is, mostly). Then the second half started, and we turned the corner straight into a brick wall like the spineless dickheads we are. Five minutes after the restart, Morgan Rogers was allowed to stroll through our defence as though he was fucking George Best. He wasn’t/ isn’t. He was just allowed to walk through us like a knife through Halloween pumpkins. Our players looked like pumpkins. The dings. Nobody particularly inconvenienced him. He simply wandered into the penalty area and dinked the ball over Senne Lammens whose face resembled someone chewing lemons: one-nil.
How many times are we going to do this? How many goals do we concede just after kick-off? How many do we concede just before half-time? How many do we concede in the dying minutes? How many goals do we concede, full stop? It’s becoming embarrassing.
And, as per usual with this lot of Peter Pumpkinheads pulling their peters, our heads went. All that confidence, all those pretty triangles, all that promise evaporated like sea mist. Suddenly we were all at sea, looking like a team that had never met each other before and actually didn’t like the look of each other anyway. Maguire, whose head resembles a pumpkin more than most, looked like someone had said ‘Trick’, not ‘Treat’ when he chapped their door. Nobody knows what to do when you say ‘Trick’ or do a trick. Not in this team. But nobody embodied the collapse more spectacularly inappropriately than Lisandro Martínez.
My dad was listening to talkSPORT, where apparently someone described Martínez’s display as the worst individual performance of the Premier League era. Now, that’s quite a claim, given the competition, but I wouldn’t be rushing to defend him. He was absolutely dreadful. This was a Halloween horrorshow from the man I’ll now refuse to ever call The Butcher again. Rogers had him on toast (intercontinental French toast if you’re looking for ANOTHER Beastie Boys pun). At one point, Joe Cole, on co-commentary, described Rogers as carrying Martínez around like a backpack. Which was a surprisingly lovely turn of phrase from Joe Cole, another fucking short arse. Joe Cole who usually sounds just like Joe Swash.
Martínez seemed determined to make matters worse, the ding. Having already picked up a booking for fouling Rogers, he decided that the sensible thing to do at a Chelsea corner was to swing an arm into Wesley Fofana’s face. We all saw it, apart from the ref, who was blind as a Halloween bat. VAR intervened, obv. Penalty, obv. Second yellow. Off you go, get your Halloween outfit on and chap some doors. You look about the size of some of the eight year olds trick or treating round our way. Is your name Michael Diamond? Nah, mine’s Clarence.
Cole Palmer, sporting a haircut which could have been sculpted by a cleaver, scored from the spot, and that was that. But what really annoyed me wasn’t just the stupidity of the challenge. It was Martínez’s reaction. That smirk as he left the pitch. Like he’d just done a smelly trump in his blimp costume. Perhaps it was disbelief. Perhaps it was frustration. Perhaps I’m being unfair. But to a supporter watching his team implode yet again, it looked like someone who wasn’t taking the situation remotely seriously. Creeping through the Kop End with a cleaver indeed. He wants to grow the fuck up.
It was, frankly L Stein, unforgivable. And I’m a surly stick in the mud at the best of times. Apart from when I’m being nostalgic. This is a team in crisis. A manager under enormous pressure. Supporters who spend fortunes following them around the country. The least we should expect is that the players look as though they give a toss. There was one final moment of excitement, deep into the seemingly endless morass of added time, when Mbeumo produced an extraordinary blooter of a volley that Chelsea’s goalkeeper, Peter The Halloween Cat Bonetti, somehow managed to touch onto the crossbar. The thing was hit with such ferocity I thought the bar might still be wobbling when the groundsmen arrived on Monday morning to look for that bin Jose Mourinho once hid in. Part of me wished it had hit Martínez instead of the bar. It might have wiped that smirk off his face.
But the real heroes of Saturday afternoon weren’t wearing red shirts on the pitch. They were, yet again, in the away end. For more than 100 minutes, United’s travelling supporters were magnificent. Loud, defiant, furious and funny. They sang about Jason Wilcox. They sang about the Glazers. They sang about Jim Ratcliffe and his Dingle mates. They made their feelings about the ownership and the direction of the club abundantly clear.
And then, wonderfully, United’s own social media account decided to celebrate the brilliant away support by highlighting the fans singing the United Calypso. Which rather missed the point – it was about as far off point as a Diogo Dalot shot. Check Your Heads, United. The supporters weren’t simply there to provide a lovely soundtrack for the club’s social media team. They were protesting. They were angry. They were telling the people running Manchester United exactly what they thought of them.
And who can blame them? We’re being let down by the ownership, by the decision-makers, by the apparent absence of any coherent tactical plan, and increasingly by players who seem unable to cope with the slightest setback. Wobbling like jelly the lot of ’em. For 45 minutes on Saturday, we were reminded what United can look like when the players actually play football. For the next 45, we were reminded why we’re in this mess.
Mike D might be 60, but at least he knew how to put on a show. At Manchester United, we’re still fighting for our right to something resembling a football team.