I resent the fact I’m being forced to do it and it pains me to even mention it in public, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to become a Manchester United supporter for the rest of the season.
I have no great love for Manchester United. In fact, I don’t even like them. Mild dislike would probably best sum up my feelings towards them.
Swaggering around in the self-annointed Theatre of Dreams, darlings of the national media, they are arrogant, conceited and generally irritating - and that’s just the few Mancs who support them. Nope, I do not have a secret soft spot for the Red Devils.
The problem is, while I dislike Manchester United, I can’t stand Chelsea and that is the crucial thing as they go head to head for the Premier League title and the Champions League.
In some ways it is an irrational hatred, but I’d like to think I’m a better person than that and there are plenty of perfectly reasonable reasons why I don’t like Chelsea!
1)Their fans were among the worst during the hooligan days of the 70s and 80s. There was a large racist National Front element at Stamford Bridge and they were generally pretty repulsive wherever they went.
2) Kerry Dixon - weasly faced former striker who was once a rival to my boyhood hero Gary Lineker. The cheek of it!
3) Ken Bates - former chairman who is now doing his best to make Leeds United even more unlikeable than they already are.
4) The fact they were always pretty useless when I was growing up and then suddenly turned good because they were in a fashionable part of London and lots of fancy foreign footballers wanted to live near there.
5) The fact that, having become fashionable, they picked up lots of new glory hunting fans who boasted how brilliant they were while wearing freshly purchased replica strips. At least Manchester United and Liverpool have always had glory hunting fans!
6) I’m from East London, they are in West London. Do the maths.
7) The fact that, having over-stretched themselves in the transfer market and wages for years Chelsea were on the verge of going bankrupt. That would have given Newcastle an excellent chance of establishing themselves as a Champions League side along with the likes of Everton and Aston Villa, even Tottenham. Instead, on the brink of disaster, Roman Abramovich arrived, cleared all the debt and then funded one of the most extravagant spending sprees ever seen in football.
8) They play boring counter-attacking football.
9) Frank Lampard is the most over-rated footballer of his generation. (However, I did admire the way he took that penalty for his recently-departed mother Pam on Wednesday night).
10) They don’t even have Jose Mourinho to entertain us any more.
That’s ten good reasons for me to want Chelsea’s season to end in zilch, zippo, bugger all, diddly squat so I feel as though I have fully justified my controversial stance.
So yes, I’ll be cheering for Sir Alex Ferguson and his boys until the end of May. What a depressing state of affairs. I will surely look back on these next few weeks and cry!
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