PUBLIC MEETING – THURSDAY 7:30PM
In the Mirror Oliver Holt discusses the evening to come:
A public meeting will take place at the Methodist Hall in Oldham Street in Manchester tomorrow night. Manchester United supporters will make a pilgrimage there to grieve over the corpse of their club.
Some of them, in the great non-conformist traditions of the old venue opposite Affleck's Palace, will agitate for protest. They will argue they can hold on to their season tickets, keep going to Old Trafford and try to destabilise the new regime of Malcolm Glazer from the inside.
Others will say that is pointless self-delusion and that all attempts at dissent will be stamped out. Smiley's one of those. He wrote a brutally honest piece in the Red Issue fanzine last week pointing out the futility of action from within.
"Remember," he said, "Old Trafford was like watching football in a police state when it was a simple PLC regime. It's soon to be a dictatorship."
Others will stick to their mantra of No Customers, No Profits. They're the fans who say Saturday's FA Cup Final will be their last match as a United fan.
However much it hurts them, they are going to end their years of allegiance to England's most famous club. Some of them want to build a new club from the ground up. They have already had discussions with the founders of AFC Wimbledon.
They have been given indications they might be able to start at Unibond League level. There are tentative plans to adopt The Willows, Salford's rugby league ground, as their home.
Some have already dismissed them as hopeless romantics. Some have scorned them as shallow attention-seekers who will crumble when they don't get their way. But I think all the United fans who stream into the Methodist Hall after work tomorrow deserve our backing.
I admire their militancy, for a start. I admire their refusal to roll over and just accept that might is right. I admire them for having some principles. I admire them for caring enough about what happens to their club to try to do something about it.
Because the Glazer takeover of Manchester United is about far more than the health of our biggest club. It's about taking another giant step to rip our national game away from its traditional supporter base.
"What a lot of the media don't seem able to grasp is that we are not protesting about Glazer just because we are worried about our club," Jules Spencer, the chair of the Independent Manchester United Supporters Association, told me yesterday.
"We are not believers in Manchester United at all costs. Much as I revelled in Leeds going down at the end of last season, deep down I was thinking that was two fixtures a season I was really going to miss and that probably weren't going to be back for a long time.
"I don't want to see a man come in and break up the revenue-sharing agreements that are in place because he is so desperate to make more money to service his massive debts.
"I don't want Bury and Rochdale and Stockport to be pushed over the edge of the chasm they're already teetering on because of another man's greed. I don't want a situation where no working-class people and no youngsters can come to games because of the price and because everything is going to be slanted even more to the corporates.
"Sooner or later there's going to be a backlash against the way football in our country is going and Glazer is just going to accelerate that. I want United to grow and prosper but not at any cost."
And you know what? I agree with him. Absolutely 100 per cent.
I don't want the bad old days of crumbling stadiums back but I'm tired of people like me sitting back in our cynicism and our resignation and doing nothing while the atmosphere in our stadia dies and football continues to disenfranchise its traditional base.
Something important is happening here. Something worth fighting for. Something bigger than Manchester United. So all power to the fans who walk into the Methodist Hall tomorrow night. All power to them for standing up and speaking out. It's just a shame there aren't more like them.