Devils of Heath

No, I am not talking about VAR, Football Authorities, Inflated Transfer Markets, Players, Coaches or Club Executives. I am talking about us, the football fan.  During the lockdown, every stadium has displayed ‘Football is nothing without the fans’. While that is correct, today it’s the fans who are ruining the game. Sounds cruel, well asks the players how they feel, when they read what there own fans write to them on certain platforms. The term ‘reactionary fan base’ was coined by the hardcore loyalists to distance themselves from the volatile fans that surrounded them on different platforms. Terms like ‘agenda merchants’ have also been developed to define the reactions of certain fans. Actually, this is where the trouble really started, the division of the football fan base within a club has deepened since the turn of the millennium and has only accelerated further in the last decade. I see today the first tendency is to blame an increasingly connected world for giving a platform ...

Carpe Diem .i.e, sieze the moment, sieze the day – it’s a concept Manchester United grab only occasionally. There was an excellent piece by Carl Anka today in The Athletic, which highlighted the similarities between the Istanbul game and what transpired last night. Let’s hope what transpires after this isn’t the same as what we saw in the CL group. Siezing the moment is something those at a boardroom level at United also fail to do when it comes to football. You are in January, your manager has toiled hard to get an imbalanced squad to the top of the league, and not only are you still struggling to get rid of the deadwood, you are sleep walking through a golden chance to give the squad a boost with a couple of smart signings. There was a mad scramble for Bruno and Ighalo last year when European football was at stake, there should have been a madder scramble when a Premier League title was surprisingly within reach. Seizing the moment is something Martial too has failed to do. This ...