Globally Red

There are a lot of complications associated with being a part of the global village. I mean, for one, there’s no place you can run to when you’ve just gone and called someone some names. Look ma! They’re in here too…

But I haven’t called anyone anything. Yet. My complaints against the humanity holding hands thingy run along other lines. Think about it.

What exactly am I doing, for example, posting about some bunch of morons who play a moronic sport on a tiny island halfway across what they tell me is the world. I haven’t been there. I haven’t ever seen this ‘Theatre of Dreams’. Never bought a season ticket for half a grand considering that that would be my salary for an entire year out here. I don’t even begin to claim that I know anything about Football at the EPL level.

Yet, like so many millions of other ‘fans’, I watch the telly and mint my opinions based on some dumb photograph of Ronnie winking after a rather clumsy argument with the Ref. I declare my amorous attachment to a bunch of players having never met them or seen them. Sigh. Introspection often seems to border on questioning one’s sanity…

This is the typical story of the global contributors to the goliathesque fan base of United. I can’t say that I am any different being a part of a ten-year-old generation of fans who grew up with Rupert Murdoch’s Star TV and its later broadcasts of the Barclay’s English Premier League. Don’t know much about ‘The Doc’ or the twenty and six years without a trophy to our (United’s?) name. We see the Reds as we want to see them. Not as a debt-ridden, ancient and musty British footballing factory located in the heart of Manchester. Hell, I’d like to know how many of the fans actually know which end is the famed Stretford? Was it the right one or the…um…wait…

As I sit here, slyly churning out another post when I should be hard at work, I begin to wonder if I should somehow feel inferior, or stupid, or both. Can’t say it feels great. I wonder if I should feel stupid, or somehow inferior to all the ‘true’ fans, or both- in effect making me a ‘Truly Inferior variety of a Stupid Fan’. Bad one, I know.

The essential distinction between cold logic and mad emotion rears its ugly capital once again. I will renew my choice too, in concurrence.

Forever United.