Ant Mann 1997©It really stirred the heart to hear Liverpool fans in full voice the other week, singing 'You'll Never Walk Alone' as the mighty Reds handed Derby a 4-0 pasting. It's hard to be certain of course, since it was impossible to pick the individual voices out of the throng, but could it be that these were the same people who spent the previous week jamming the talkback phone lines, slagging off Roy Evans and the Liverpool players with such eloquence after their 3-0 loss at Strasbourg? Not that there is anything exceptional about that. The same thing happens around the country week-in, week-out, as teams that are expected to win every game they play...lose. Not surprisingly, these days the whining is loudest on Richard Littlejohn's Disgruntled Spurs Fan's Shared Pain Show on Radio Five Live.
Most of these wounded post-loss tirades are of a kind. They begin with the phrase "We're a big club...", and include the words "sack", "manager", "board", "money", "players", "we", "deserve", "to", "be", "the", "greatest", "team", "in", "the" and "world". You don’t here Man Utd fans talking like that any more, and won't again until King Herod moves north to undermine their youth policy, but it's amazing just how many 'big clubs' there are these days. Forget about the Premier League for a moment. Cast your eyes down the list of First Division sides. Birmingham are undoubtedly a 'big club'. So are Manchester City, Middlesborough, Notts Forest, QPR, Sheffield Utd, Sunderland and Wolves. And then there are the clubs which aspire to bigness, biggish teams like Ipswich and West Brom. For good measure, why not throw in Fulham from Division Two? They possess a certain nascent bigness that can't be ignored.
It goes without saying that all these clubs deserve to win at least the European Club Champion, but for starters, their rightful place is in the Premier League where they can pit themselves against the other big clubs. So...Barnsley, Crystal Palace, Coventry, Leicester, Sheffield Wednesday, Southampton and West Ham, you'll have to go. (I did hear a fan the other night muttering something about Wednesday being a big club, but I just assumed it was a feeble attempt at humour). Blackburn and Bolton, I admit that you're a special case: you have a history of bigness, and Blackburn, you've won the League recently, but it's not quite enough, I'm afraid. You were small for too long a time, and the stigma is still there. Out you go. And as for Wimbledon, what the hell do you think you are doing?? Get thee gone from the Premier League, now!
Any club that has any complaints, just remember: it's your own fault for not being big.
All right, I admit this is no more than a sweet pipe dream. Thanks to the cruel injustices of life in general and malevolent cosmic forces in particular, some big clubs will never escape the ignominy and drudgery of Division One. Some will even drop to Division Two and become 'sleeping giants'. But there’s hope. Just the other day a disgruntled Leicester supporter somehow sneaked through onto Richard Littlejohn's Tortured Tottenham Time.
'We're a small club', the disgruntled fan said, 'so we don’t really deserve to be in the top flight. We've got to sack this O'Neil bloke and try to attract someone with a track record of crapness who can take us down a division and keep us there. And that's not all. We’re performing too well as a team, and the players have to put their hands up and shoulder some of the blame. If we sell a few of the better ones and bring in some second-rate foreign prima donnas to sow some discord, I think we can still make the relegation zone.'