THE DREAM TICKET

I brought The Young Lad over to see Manchester United v. Aston Villa last weekend at Old Trafford, or, if you like, the Theatre of Dreams.

A lot of people don’t like this, preferring to describe it as The Last Refuge of Satan’s Spawn. But The Young Lad (TYL) is not yet prey to such misgivings. His existence is more or less centred on the concept of Manchester United, and it is his implicit ambition to keep them in the style to which they are accustomed, an ambition largely sponsored by me.

Like Moslems going to Mecca, all peoples who subscribe to this superstition must, of necessity, make a personal appearance at the Theatre Of Dreams at least once in their lives.

The anxieties which attend this pilgrimage are equivalent to Ramadan – the fasting, the hallucinations, the insomnia, the bad craziness.

It is not the easiest thing in the world to get two tickets for the Theatre Of Dreams these days. It is marginally easier to remove the contents of Fort Knox, ingot by ingot, in a pick-up truck, and a bit harder than making a Brinks-Allied heist.

But lo, it came to pass, by a series of transactions which are far too complex for any sportswriter with any respect for his or her readers to recount.

Suffice to say that when the Big Bird left Dublin for Manchester, TYL and I were on it, arse pocket lined with entry visas to the Forbidden City, ancestral home of the Red Terror. Also on board were several other pilgrims complete with TYL, including one unfortunate with four burr-haired TYLs, all festooned with unconscionable amounts of merchandise.

On arrival, there was no time to lose, so with a mere five hours until kick-off, a high-speed taxi brought us straight to the Manchester United Superstore at Old Trafford. My money was already burning a hole in TYL’s pocket. On this, the first visit of the day, I got away with the new blue-and-white strip, plus extras including the name “Cantona”, the number “7”, and two badges.

“Do you want the badges, too?” the man enquired, and mentally I replied, in a Mexican accent, “Badges?! Badges?! We don’t need no steenking badges!!” Verbally, I answered, “OK.”

The first thing that you notice about Manchester is that everyone holds your money up to the light to check the watermark. In the absence of the IRA terror, is there a suspicion that people with Irish accents are seeking to destabilise the currency by flooding England with funny twenty-pound notes?

After a tour of the perimeter of the Theatre Of Dreams, where the purveyors of fast food were preparing their Recipes Of Death, we marches to the nearby Copthorne Hotel, where the Irish were beginning to assemble. Jesus, they’re a happy oul’ crowd, and no mistake. They all had that expression of bonhomie radiating from every pore, an expression normally found on men who have just won the Grand National.

In classical fashion, we had A Big Feed, paid for with a twenty-pound note which the cashier held up to the light as though in admiration of the capitalist ethic itself.

Soon, we were back in the Theatre, counting down to kick-off, with the United disc-jockey encouraging everyone to sing Happy Birthday to Norman Wisdom, who is 80.

Norman Wisdom, for fuck’s sake, Albania’s favourite entertainer. To the eternal credit of the Irish all around us, and the Stretford End in general, there were very few takers.

You’d need to be well-oiled to go along with that shit, and as drinking is confined to the tunnels underneath the stand, there was no show. There, in Stygian conditions, you can consume plastic glasses of “United” lager or “United” bitter and much “United” crisps, before queuing up at half-time for a “United” slash. It would be a brave man indeed who would hazard a “United” crap. That would come later.

TYL photographed the game from every conceivable angle, and snapped Andy “King” Cole netting his first United goal.

I was impressed with Andy “King” Cole all round. He may be no Einstein, but he is one menacing mutha on the park. I was just as unimpressed by Villas’ John Fashanu, who is phonier than a twenty-pound note issued by The Workers’ Party.

He made a horrible lunge at “Giggsy”, which ended happily with Fashanu being carried off. He was probably faking that too, due to a pressing engagement on Gladiators.

For the Irish, there were, as they say, hopeful indicators on Jack Charlton’s Dow Jones Index.

The resurgent “Keano” was suspended, but Steve Staunton was superb, Andy Townsend wasn’t half bad, that man McGrath was a cut above the pack, even in slow motion, and Irwin was Irwin, a diamond.

A churlish note was sounded by a whining Dubliner behind us, who kept saying “ah Jaysus, lads, will ye sit down,” whenever United PLC threatened the Villa goal, and the twelve rows in front of him would stand in pre-orgasmic anticipation.

“Ah Jaysus, lads, will ye sit down?” he would bray, as though he were watching Sky TV in his local pub, the pillock.

But I digress from the essence of the experience, which was the laying down of ackers at the shrine of The Red Devils.

There was a second Manchester United Superstore to be visited, a new one, a bigger one.

They don’t mind taking twenty-pound notes in this establishment, so TYL selected an “Ince” T-shirt and another of those steenking badges. He wouldn’t go the Giggsy towel.

While awaiting a taxi underneath the Munich Clock, I sampled a “hot dog”, which, for reasons of aesthetics, not to mention self-preservation, I binned before completion. A homeless person rooted around, picked it out, and ate the remains. The usual term is “stark metaphor.”

An airport operative, noting all of the “Manchester United Superstore” bags rolling through the security scanner, quipped, “it’s no wonder that Martin Edwards is riding around in a Jag.”

We arrived home tired but happy.