Ah yes, bitter! This taunt goes back around 20 years ago or so and was coined by rag fanzine, Red Issue. Along with their portrayal of Jim Leighton as a gap-toothed zombie, these were probably their most memorable contributions to the movement. Oddly enough, I’d known their cartoonist from way back when, but didn’t realise he was their cartoonist. I didn’t even know he was a rag, come to think of it! I only found out when I was introduced to a couple of them in a bar in town one night, by chance; as they were all referred to by nicknames in their fanzine.
They were only just coming into the start of their most successful period in their history, although they didn’t know it at the time. Almost overnight, having just about managed to win the FA Cup in 1990 after Palace had taken them to a replay, the “Fergie out” banners were quickly discarded and the often empty spaces in their ground started to fill up again with fickle fans as the night boat from Dublin and the M5 from the West Country started to look like attractive propositions again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989–90_Manchester_United_F.C._season
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990–91_Manchester_United_F.C._season
Ironically, we find ourselves in a similar position, but with a far better team and Champions League football to look forward to, rather than the European Cup Winners’ Cup.
The rags have always had a knack of picking an FA Cup up every few years anyway, but after beating Barcelona in the Cup Winners’ Cup Final in ’91, miraculously it was as if the previous four or five years under Ferguson had never happened. The kind of airbrushing of history so favoured by the Soviet Union in the old days was wheeled out, while our own bitter tag took on a life of its own as more jumped on it and, it seemed, us too. Aided and abetted by the rags’ friends in the mainstream media who appeared to plunder their fanzines for ‘stories,’ the term became universal coinage: a handy, if ill-thought out, dig at the fans of a team who’d retained a hardcore support of 20,000+ (a significant figure in those pre-Premier League days) in spite of several relegations. We were hardly unique in our hatred of our most local of rivals; this kind of thing happens in every city, town and village in the world, but we alone stood accused.
While the rags were quick to condemn us - that is when they weren’t accusing us of such heinous crimes as living in Stockport and singing nursery rhymes at their games against such illustrious continental opposition as Pécsi Munkás (att: 28,411) or Rotor Volvograd (29,724) - they were getting away with hypocrisy of the highest order. For years they’d hated Liverpool with a passion. With a loathing you couldn’t measure. Even today, ask any one of them why this should be and they’ll tell you it’s because they’re Scousers (although throwing Rooney into the mix does confuse them). Or they’re thieves. Or worse. They might even mention having to build the Ship Canal, but very, very few will admit what the real reason is for this rush of blood to the head: that in their heart of hearts they bitterly resented Liverpool’s dominance, success in the 1970s and ’80 and - more than anything else – the fact that most football fans respected the Liverpool team. When Ferguson talked about knocking them “off their perch,” it hardly scratched the surface… a surface made of 100%, pure, unadulterated bile. However, he’s never emulated Liverpool – or even Busby – by having had a team that was loved or admired by anyone but their own.
But if their apparently inexplicable hatred for Liverpool isn’t enough, they’ve also been bitter about (in reverse order): us and our money, Chelsea’s money and success, Leeds’ success (denying them that last ever chance of being Football League Champions in 1992, but not before a rag fanzine had prematurely proclaimed that they – rather than Leeds – were the champions on the front cover!), and Blackburn’s money and success. If anyone’s bitter it is, of course, them and “Ferguson, with a face like a smacked arse.”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpzTv5fHgn0[/youtube]
We all know it, and they must know it. And yes, even those miserable excuses for human beings who never stir from their favourite armchair or pub stool to drag themselves on the often short trip to The Swamp, because they “can’t get a ticket” or “because it’s too dear” or because, as one rag told me on Sunday, “I can’t go because I play at weekend,” after proudly announcing that he’d been in that very same pub when they’d beaten Arsenal 6-2 a mere 21 years ago. It’s some amateur career he’s had then! In reality, Dave from Truro and Micheal from Dublin are sitting where they might have sat, if they weren’t so interested in giving it the big one instead in the nearest tap-room.
In the eyes of the ordinary football fan, the rags are the untouchables – not because of what their team has won or whatever else they may have achieved, but because they are shunned in the way the Dalits or Outcastes have been for centuries in India. In comparison, being called “bitter” is neither here nor there – two decades' worth of Pavlov’s Dog-like repetition by those who purport to support them has rendered the term meaningless to this pair of ears and yet, it is they who are increasingly looking like the new bitters. Once again!
