The Pie At Night: In Search of the North at Play

by Stuart Maconie

  Whatever the reason, things did change and football didn’t just continue but flourish, rising Phoenix-like not as ‘the English disease’ but a national religion. At some point around the Italia 90 World Cup tournament, football became hip in a way it had never been in the cloth cap era. It has stayed that way ever since, given a huge fillip in 1992 with the dawn of the Premier League borne on a tidal wave of loot from Rupert Murdoch and Sky.

  Not everyone welcomed this. Take Roy Keane. Former Manchester United captain Roy is a hard man to like if you’re a neutral. His violent playing style, graceless and belligerent demeanour and, latterly, dour punditry on our TV screens, have ruined many a day for football fans not of the Man United persuasion. But those fans do love him and even those who don’t must credit him for one of the defining sayings of modern football culture. Commenting on the docility and silence of the home fans after a Manchester United Champions League game at Old Trafford against Dynamo Kyiv, Keane remarked ‘Away from home our fans are fantastic, I’d call them the hardcore fans. But at home they have a few drinks and probably the prawn sandwiches, and they don’t realise what’s going on out on the pitch.’

  The Prawn Sandwich Brigade quickly became part of football’s mythology. These were the bourgeois arrivistes who knew nothing of Roker Park or the Inter City Fairs Cup, boot boys or stopper centre halves. These were the ‘fans’ for whom a competition like the Champions League was made, an expensive catwalk of millionaires and ludicrously named since not all the participants were champions and it wasn’t a league.

  I decided a visit to football on such a night was obligatory. I would see whether prawn sandwiches, or possibly moussaka, were on the menu when Manchester United met Olympiacos of Greece in the most glamorous and expensive club football competition in the world.

  At the other end of that ENFA table of long suffering fans than Rochdale, the most cosseted, success-addled and spoiled of all English football fans are the Red Army of Manchester United. This is not just a swipe, a blast of hostile opinion, of which there is much, but statistically proven according to ENFA’s research based on trophies won and league placings. United fans have had it good for as long as most can remember.

  The Olympiacos game though came at a curious moment in the club’s fortunes. In May 2013, Alex Ferguson, their longest serving manager and one of the most successful in the history of British football, retired and was instrumental in choosing his successor, ‘the chosen one’ David Moyes, then manager of Everton. Like Ferguson, Moyes was a tough Scot with a reputation as a stern disciplinarian and with a blunt style; the two men were born at opposite ends of the Clyde tunnel in Glasgow. Maybe out of vanity, Ferguson had chosen a manager exactly like himself – but in this case one who’d never won a major trophy – when the richest club in the world could have had its pick of the finest coaches anywhere on the planet. It proved a bad mistake.

  Rumblings from the fans were turning into open dissent as United stumbled and fell by the wayside in almost every competition. A group of disgruntled fans even hired a light aircraft over Old Trafford trailing a banner that read ‘Wrong One — Moyes Out’. The Olympiacos game, with the chance to progress in Europe and salvage something from the season, was seen as a make or break moment for Moyes and United.

  Old Trafford, the ‘Theatre of Dreams’ as it is rather fancifully known (football fans are nothing if not sentimental), lies a few hundred yards from the Salford dockyards from which it once drew much of its core support. Bobby Charlton said that Matt Busby would often point to the docks and the stevedores sweating there, and tell his Busby Babes that they were playing for those men; men who worked at hard physical labour all week and who lived for the weekend and United.

  When the Premier League began the age of the average fan was 22 and almost a quarter of them were aged between 16 and 20. Now the average age is 41, reflecting the change in cost. Like the Salford docks themselves, now home to the BBC’s MediaCity, Coronation Street and the University of Salford, football has become a more expensive and upmarket proposition.

  Tickets for tonight’s game were forty quid, which seems a lot, especially if you’re a dad taking his sons (or daughters), but there is, of course, another way of seeing this. Yes (as critics constantly point out), for this kind of money you could go to the opera, or see Shakespeare performed in Stratford. But logically, why shouldn’t it cost as much as attendance at those events? Even if you loathe Manchester United (and if you do, then substitute Manchester City, Liverpool, Arsenal, Barcelona or whoever), you have to acknowledge that these are some of the finest practitioners of their art in the world, playing at the very highest level. Why shouldn’t it cost as much as a night at La Scala or seeing Yo-Yo Ma conducted by Simon Rattle? This is a contentious position, and I’m not even sure it’s mine, but it’s worth a thought.

  Tonight I got my ticket thanks to my companion at the game, Luke, a friend of mine who’s a writer and Man United fan. He’s currently working on a book about the giant global brand that is Manchester United. Research suggests they have 659 million supporters around the world, 80 million in the lucrative Asian markets, in places a long way from the Stretford End; places like Riyadh, Phnom Penh, Seoul and Djakarta. Here they will turn out in their thousands for United’s pre-season tours. Last year this tour took 73 staff and the marketing team outnumbered, and were probably as vital as, the players. The club have 29 international commercial partners, from Mamee Noodles, Aeroflot and Casillero del Diablo wine to Kansai Paints, DHL and Mister Potato, ‘Official Savoury Snack Partner of Manchester United’.

  Luke tells me that the Russian supporters club (called satisfyingly the Moscow Reds) get two tickets each for every away game. Perks like this rankle with some hardcore British supporters, who Luke suspects secretly don’t mind the team’s current poor form. A few fallow years might see off the johnny-come-lately’s and the glory hunters and make a little more room for the long term fans being elbowed (and priced) out of the ground. This isn’t the mood in the boardroom, of course, where the financial indices and stock exchanges are being viewed as closely as the League tables.

  If United’s support is on the wane, you wouldn’t guess it from the mood in Stretford tonight. The square mile or so around Chester Road and between Old Trafford and its sister cricket ground is the heart of United Country. Even the chip shop is called Lou Macari and is owned by, unsurprisingly, Lou Macari, United stalwart of the 1970s, a decade of even more wildly variable fortune for the team.

  The atmosphere is extraordinary even for someone who’s been to a lot of football matches. You’re used to seeing street scenes like this on news programmes, funerals for assassinated leaders in Tehran or Mombasa, demonstrations in Cairo or Grozny, but less so Tuesday nights in Lancashire. Every street is packed with surging tides of chanting people, chaotic and feverish, a vibrant mix of classes, accents, ages, sexes, ethnicities. It is wildly exciting and even a little intimidating, although there’s no hint of acual trouble.

  Those theorists and writers who bemoan the erosion of football’s traditional working-class support would find much to back up their theory here. I chat to two Brazilian girls, a Chinese student and a middle-aged couple from Holland. But really, is that so bad? There is still a thick enough testosterone fug around for those who want that kind of thing, and enough white, male faces to keep any UKIP member happy, I’d have thought. Me? Well, at the risk of sounding crass, I’d sooner drink my weak fizzy lager in a plastic glass with two sweet girls from São Paulo than have a potato-headed bloke in a bad anorak off the market tell me to fuck off.

  We are standing drinking outside the Bishop’s Blaize. There’s been a pub of that name here since the mid-fifteenth century, named after the patron saint of Woolcombers. It’s just a regular chain pub, a Wetherspoon’s, but there is a queue at the door, security guards and a £1 admission charge enforced by strict and elaborate ticketing policy. That’s because on match days, the Bishop’s Blaize becomes a sort of informal rally-cum-concert
; a pulsing, raucous, jostling cauldron of primal energy and noise.

  That noise is unbelievable. Everyone, bar me and a couple of frankly bemused looking Japanese guys, is singing lustily, aggressively even, conducted by a man standing on a table in the centre of the room. This man, Luke tells me, is Pete Boyle. He is Manchester United’s guerrilla musical director. He invents most of these songs and chants. Boyle can actually sell out concerts in United-mad Northern Ireland and you can buy albums’ worth of them from his website.

  Boyle is a smart and discerning chap. He bridles at the suggestion he is United’s Oasis, preferring to be known as the club’s Morrissey and Marr of The Smiths, and his compositions are often funny and sharp. Some classics are ‘Giggs Will Tear You Apart Again’ to the tune of Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ and ‘We’ll Drink A Drink To Eric The King’ (an Eric Cantona tribute to the tune of Scaffold’s ‘Lily the Pink’). One of his most ambitious and sadly stymied by the player’s move to Aston Villa, was ‘You’ll Never Stop The Cleverley’, a song about midfielder Tom Cleverley adapted from Jona Lewie’s Christmas novelty ‘Stop the Cavalry’. My particular favourite concerns United’s former Korean striker Park Ji-Sung which borrows the tune of ‘Lord of the Dance’ and manages to maintain an air of hymnal innocence while casually slurring the people of both Seoul and Liverpool. You will have to investigate yourself I’m afraid as it is slightly indelicate.

  While many of Boyle and the Stretford End’s songs are witty and clever, some rely for their force on good old-fashioned spite and vulgarity. The song I heard most tonight was aimed at their local rivals and is sung to the tune of ‘This Old Man’, culminating in the pleasant refrain ‘With a nick nack paddy wack, give a dog a bone, why don’t City fuck off home’.

  This, along with the simple but effective ‘Twenty Times’, a reference to their number of league titles and aimed squarely at the loathed Liverpool, rings out around the swelling ground before kick off. So does the ‘United Calypso’, recorded in 1957 by the Caribbean singer Eric Robinson and a tribute to the Busby Babes, recorded and thus given all the more poignancy by the fact that just a year later many of that magnificent young team were killed in the Munich air disaster.

  We’re in the corner of the East Stand, to the right of the Sir Alex Ferguson Stand and opposite the famous Stretford End, home of United’s most fanatical support. Over my left shoulder, high up in the gods (appropriately), are the several hundred supporters from opponents Olympiacos, champions of Greece and based in Piraeus, the port district of Athens.

  They are the most successful Greek club side ever, much to the chagrin of their deadly Athenian rivals Panathinaikos (with whom they contest the wonderfully named ‘Derby Of The Eternal Adversaries’), but they have never won a game in their previous 11 visits to England and along the way they’ve conceded 37 goals.

  Bearing all this in mind, and the fact that at this point the Greek economy was trembling on the verge of complete collapse, you have to applaud these fans’ commitment and the proud way they belt out the club song. This seems to be Boney M’s ‘Rasputin’ with new and to me unintelligible lyrics, while from all corners of the ground, United fans respond with the internationally recognised gesture for onanist.

  The mood in our stand is different from what it would have been 30 years ago, I think, less chaotic and febrile maybe, but still with nothing of the concert hall or gallery. A current of cold aggression and suppressed rage runs thinly but perceptibly through.

  A young steward with a bird-like visage, a tie beneath his tabard and a nervous laugh comes to tell the blokes around me who are standing up (in contravention of current stadium regulations) to, ‘Sit down boys!’ ‘Why? ask these older, hard faced men with grimaces of menace. Having no answer, the kid retreats. The man beside me has a face that has never seen a moisturiser, I fancy, and he chants along under his breath, undemonstratively but threateningly, turning occasionally to give the travelling Greeks an obscene gesture. He conforms to my gut feeling that hard-looking blokes are scarier when they speak quietly, which is why current Leicester manager Nigel Pearson is so unsettling.

  If you’ve never been to Old Trafford, and you are unburdened by a partisan hatred for United, then you will be impressed. Huge and imposing, it is the largest football ground in England after Wembley and far more atmospheric. Oddly though, its record attendance is for a match when United weren’t actually playing; the FA Cup Semi-Final of 1939, when 76,962 spectators watched Wolverhampton Wanderers take on Grimsby Town.

  Due to its proximity to Trafford’s industrial estates and the Manchester Ship Canal’s Salford docks, Old Trafford took a pounding from air raids during the Second World War and it took eight years to rebuild. During this time they had to play at rivals Manchester City’s Maine Road ground, itself now demolished. Manchester had its belated revenge on Germany in 1999, when they beat Bayern Munich with the last kick of the game in the Champions League final.

  That was the year that veteran Scottish striker Brian McClair left the club. Interviewing him was the reason I first came here as an NME reporter in 1989 as, along with Pat Nevin, he was one of the few footballers regarded as remotely cool. He told me that he had bought Win’s Freaky Trigger album on the strength of a gushing (and entirely deserved) ten out of ten review I’d given it in the paper. I recall being desperately chuffed with this. For the pictures, we went out into the centre circle and I recall looking around and imagining what it must be like to play here in a big game when those enormous stands were full. It was an awesome experience, in the original sense of the word, the only dampener being photographer and Manchester City nut Kevin Cummins who grizzled and moaned the whole day about having to be there. (I seem to recall once missing a flight in Chicago because Cummins wouldn’t fly United Airlines but he insists I have made this up.)

  The game itself is pretty average fare. The Greeks look unimpressive, particularly in defence, and they come bearing several gifts for United’s strikers. Robin Van Persie (‘RVP’) scores a hat trick and receives several choruses of his name song sung to the tune of White Stripes’ ‘Seven Nation Army’. In an early clash of heads, United’s Valencia gets a whopper of a black eye that swells to the size of a grapefruit that would have definitely got a boxing match stopped. However unremarkable the game, a big sporting event at night is still utterly thrilling, the emerald greens and halogen whites, the noise, the crackle of expectation, the sense of collective theatre.

  United win and the relief is tangible; it’s plainly visible in the elated faces and fist-pumping of the players. Moyes is granted a brief stay of execution and Wayne Rooney, via that most modern of media Twitter posts (presumably from the communal bath if they still have them) says: ‘Great performance from the lads and another brilliant atmosphere at Old Trafford. That one was for the fans!’

  Those fans are now swarming out into the dark Salford night, carrying Luke and I along with them, down floodlit thoroughfares of food stalls, avenues formed from crash barriers and chain link fences, burger vans and queues for the bars. All of this – the bouncers, the lines, the beer in plastic glasses – give the sense of a tough, working-class Glastonbury. From one of the vans, a tattooed girl with a mass of piled blonde hair gives me the best cheeseburger I’ve ever had. At £4.50, this would be still cheap at Glastonbury prices but it’s pricey by ‘outdoor van in the north’ prices. But then returning to my thoughts on the ticket price, we are in one of the most famous and prestigious temples of sport on Earth, one of a handful of places that are globally known and places of pilgrimage even, a Glyndebourne or Bayreuth or Stratford for the proletariat.

  There’d been rumours before the game that angry disillusioned fans intended to tear down the ‘Chosen One’ banner. This hubristic giant pennant was originally unveiled at Old Trafford in support of David Moyes, and bears his determined face. That doesn’t happen, at least not for another month or so, but the Olympiacos victory turned out the last hurrah of a dismal tenure for the Scot, and
he was sacked at the end of April 2014. The banner went too and the optimistic fans who originally commissioned it for 450 quid said they intended to auction it for charity. Maybe it’s now on a wall in Stockport or Seoul or perhaps it’s still folded up and gathering dust on top of a cupboard in a stockroom somewhere in the bowels of the Theatre of (in this case Broken) Dreams.

  I don’t go to many United matches. In fact, I’ve been to about four in my life. In that regard, I have much in common with an American family that, unusually for them, flew in from the States to watch that Olympiacos game. My excuse is that I’m not a Manchester United supporter. They have rather less justification for staying away since they own the club. All the more astonishing is the fact that the head of that family, who bought Manchester United, never set foot inside Old Trafford. Astonishing, or as others may put it, disgraceful.

  Malcolm Glazer’s story is the American dream writ large. The fifth of seven children of a Jewish Lithuanian immigrant to Rochester, New York, he inherited his dad’s watch repair business and dropped out of college to run it. He got the watch repair concession at a local air base (who knew air bases had watch repair franchises?) and from these modest beginnings became a wealthy man investing wisely in real estate, then nursing homes, then TV stations and eventually the Tampa Bay Buccaneers football team. Under Glazer, the Buccaneers prospered. Attendances rose and they reached their first ever Superbowl in 2003. Glazer was poised for his biggest acquisition yet, the purchase of the most famous football club in the world. This he did in 2005 from under the noses of several other oligarchs and billionaires, among others, Rupert Murdoch.