‘There can be no more readily understood rage in all football than that currently building in the heart of even a law-abiding Manchester United fan.
‘He awaits the ultimate football hijack, the takeover of Old Trafford by a less than alluring tycoon who fuelled his financial empire partly by profit from the most despairing segment of the American Dream, that largely sad and beaten corner of the land of the brave and the home of the free known as the trailer park.
‘A Manchester United fan, until some final moment of brutal resignation and perhaps severance, is stuck with his team and his memories and his suddenly aborted dream. So it follows naturally that if talk of violence against Glazer or members of his family is wild and unlawful and utterly reprehensible - and even more misguided than noises from the same quarter which advocated disruption of the Cheltenham Festival when John Magnier and JP McManus were seen as the greatest evil - the extent of the gut anger is inevitable.
‘What does seem a little strange, when you step back from the battleground and consider the central point of all the angst, is how this rage so quickly transfers from one hate figure to another. Why is it not more identifiable as slow-burning distaste - not so much at the perils of the present but the deep and now unbreakable betrayals of the past?
‘Setting the operating terms of the club was something never within their powers, and surely it is here that the true indignation of the United fan properly resides.
‘It is the scandal, the outrage of today's football, that men such as Glazer are able to see United as nothing more, or less, than a plain and simple cash cow, another trailer park or plastic factory.
‘Does he know anything of Munich, of how it was before that rising from the bomb site of Trafford, and how it could be that a kid from Collyhurst, Nobby Stiles, signed for free when his parents had been offered £3,000 by Bolton Wanderers - at a time when they had to pass on the pleasure of reading their evening paper because they owed the newsagent on the other side of the Rochdale Road the vast sum of £2.50? Probably not, and why would he? Glazer, as critics of his reign at Tampa Bay Buccaneers are quick to point out, is in it for money, not any tingle of the blood, and this surely is his time - the age of football as, above all else, a commodity.
‘Malcolm Glazer fills them with dread. He is today's villain, but if he passes from sight, which is looking increasingly unlikely, there will another, and then still another. This is where the horror and the sorrow properly belong.’