Manchester United ruined my life – now they’re making my day

Every great success for the brilliant United sides of old was someone else’s great humiliation – now those same fans are revelling in a turning of the tide

A little scene that says a lot, not least about the shadow cast by Manchester United’s long history of success. In south west London last Sunday, supporters of a few clubs were gathered to watch the day’s football, when Aaron Cresswell curled in West Ham United’s second against Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s side.

There were initial raucous cheers, but they were gradually engulfed by laughter. It wasn’t that relishing laughter, either, of the type that comes with a rare setback. It was a more mocking laughter, at the predictable hilarity of it all. Season four of this comedy show was really picking up speed.

That in itself is a stark but predictable turn from the utter dread this same club used to inspire. United were often a horror for everyone else.

It’s not that long ago that a 2-0 lead against Manchester United – even with little of a game to go – would have been a cause for fear; for trepidation. You knew what was coming.

“It was sometimes as if they gave teams the lead for sport,” Andy Heaton of the Anfield Wrap says. “They conditioned the opposition, any opposition, at any level, to expect what was to come by the final whistle.”

This was the other side of every single United win. Every great success was someone else’s great humiliation, to become a trampled victim of their victory. United lording it for so long had so many underfoot.

Every spring day seemed “another good afternoon for Manchester United in the title race”.

Every other club has their specific resentment; their day when Sir Alex Ferguson’s team made them feel so small.

“Watching them batter various West Ham teams over the years was to see a side operating on a different plane to everyone else, much as [Pep] Guardiola’s City side are now,” Jim Kearns of ‘The H List’ blog says. “I’ve seen us lose 6-0 and 7-1 at Old Trafford.”

“I hated them, the late goals, the arrogance, the Status Quo cup final song tripe,” Stephen Goldsmith, of Sunderland’s ‘Wise Men Say’ podcast adds.

It was something that Patrice Evra articulated well on social media on Monday.

“People are laughing at us because we hurt them so much in the past!”

And in so many ways.

There was one way that stood out above all, that fittingly lasted longest in the memory: the last-minute winner.

It was almost the ultimate display of the club’s power, as if they had a command of time itself.

Most bad memories of United revolve around this, as with Heaton and Liverpool in a 1999 FA Cup fourth-round tie. Michael Owen had put Liverpool 1-0 up after four minutes, the scoreline it still was with two minutes left. You know the rest. Dwight Yorke, then Solskjaer.

“The very second we dared to believe, United did what they always do,” Heaton says “Two goals in four minutes, the second as predictable as it was gut-wrenching. They’d done it again, and you couldn’t escape thinking that the manner of it was almost by design. And of course, they repeated the trick later that season, at the Nou Camp, and not one person in Liverpool was surprised.

Ole Gunnar Solskjaer scores the winning goal against Liverpool in 1999 (Rex Features)

“That the scorer of the winner in both those games now occupies the manager’s seat at Old Trafford is one of those quirks only football tends to throw up.”

Manchester City perhaps show this, and suffered this, more than anyone. They conceded three different last-minute winners to United in the 2009-10 season alone.

Just as all that felt so karmically reversed by City scoring three late goals to make it 6-1 at Old Trafford in October 2011, all of the current glee is a consequence of all that pain.

There’s no reason to dread United any more. And all that dread has been replaced by a delight, locked up and cranked up for years.

“I remember getting into school the day after a City defeat in about 1997 and a United-supporting friend greeted me with a version of Oasis’s ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’: ‘And so City can wait, they know it’s too late, cos they’ve lost once again…’” David Mooney, of City’s Blue Moon podcast explains.

“He was symptomatic of what a lot of United fans of my generation are – or were. They believe, or believed at least, that there was something genuinely different about them and that line about it being in their DNA was more than just hyperbole. I used to hate that, so it’s nice to see a lot of those types of United fan – and there are more down-to-earth United fans, but they weren’t teasing me in school – having to watch the club sink into insignificance.”

United appear an altogether different side now (Getty)

Kearns goes further.

“Fans of teams like Manchester United only need to look at wider society to understand their unpopularity and the glee over their downfall. You can’t hoover up so much of the resources in the game, fix the finances to your own ends and expect people to like you. They are the living embodiment of privilege.”

This, however, is what is so marked about United’s decline. The privilege of wealth remains. You only have to look at the latest financial figures.

This is why one parallel remains, right down to the glee that went with that, not least from United fans: Liverpool in the 1990s.

“Since Ferguson’s exit – and it’s only now people are confident enough to say it publicly – but our hope was they’d stutter in much the way Liverpool did under Souness,” Heaton explains. “The thinking was that they’re so powerful solutions would be easily afforded and implemented. But if anything, it’s their size and weight of history that is their biggest issue, like a super tanker struggling to turn in testing waters, and having tried pretty much every different approach possible, they’re, at least on the pitch, unrecognisable.”

Off the pitch, everyone now recognises executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward’s face.

“The fact they haven’t made a good decision in five years and are still a leading team is also a problem,” Kearns adds. “As soon as they replace Woodward and Solskjaer with anyone halfway competent they’ll be back on top again, such are their financial advantages. Another reason to explain the current outpouring of joy.”

Barney Chilton, of United’s Red News fanzine, feels all this should just be new motivation for his club.

“I am honestly not bothered about rival fans. When you lord it up for 23 years with incredible success we could only have dreamed of in the 1980s – hoping we would win just one title – you now have to take your medicine. You would like to think it makes those at United acutely aware how bad things now are. More painful is we dropped the ball and messed things up just at the wrong time as our two biggest rivals got their act together. We are outsiders to what was our party.

Times have changed at Manchester United (Getty Images)

“We are not as bad as Utd in the 1980s, but I fear this is not the bottom of how bad things could get.

“As each year passes I am more fearful. Football does give pain and pleasure in cycles but because we seem so loathe to implement a sensible long term vision and approach with, say, a proper footballing structure above the manager, letting Ed Woodward and his ego continue to fail, I can’t see how we can get out of this loop of making the same mistakes. A mess much of our own making, you wonder what Fergie feels of how the club have handled it.”

We know how everyone else feels.

“United’s time may come again, but for now it’s over,” Mooney says. “You won’t find much sympathy from City fans who grew up being told that United were just a better club and that no team would ever be as good as them.

“If the best they can do these days is to postpone City winning a title by a week with an unexpected win at the Etihad, then they’ve become exactly what they derided others for in the past.”

And everyone else is now revelling because of that past.