Touching, wasn’t it? Watching that loyal, diehard United hero David Beckham getting the roaring welcome so thoroughly deserved of Manchester’s prodigal son brought tears to the uncynical eye.But not, I’m afraid, to the cynical like mine.
Beckham keeps telling us United is, and always has been, the only club for him. And the inhabitants of Old Trafford seem to happily go along with this tosh. When the reality is that he walked out on United at the peak of his powers for the riches of Real Madrid, then walked out on Madrid for the even greater riches of Hollywood, and now cheats on LA Galaxy whenever he can with AC Milan, purely to keep himself in the World Cup frame, where England glory could bring the greatest riches of all.
Compared with genuinely loyal United heroes like Giggs, Scholes and Neville, Beckham’s been a treacherous, money-grabbing, club-hopping, fame-hungry, egotistical little weasel who likes nothing better than making everything all about HIM.
And nothing personified this more than when he swooped to pick up the green-and-gold anti-Glazer protest scarf and wrapped it round his tattooed neck. The crowd roared. There he was, the most loyal man in football, their Becksy, showing the world he was united with United fans in their fury at foreign ownership.
Because the very last thing David Beckham would ever want to associate himself with is rich, fatcat Americans exploiting soccer for pure commercial gain. Which is why he currently resides in Los Angeles, choosing to play pub football over proper football because rich, fat-cat Americans line his Armani pockets with millions of dollars to exploit soccer for pure commercial gain.
Of course, as David explained afterwards, he wasn’t actually supporting the protest, nor trying to interfere in the running of Manchester United.
Nothing could be further from his massively cerebral mind. He just liked the colours of the scarf because they used to be United’s original colours.
What a load of old Goldenballs. Let’s face some harsh facts here, Becksy old son. You’re not the best footballer in the world. In fact, given you can’t actually get into the AC Milan starting line-up, you’re not even the 11th-best player in a shockingly mediocre side.
But you ARE the greatest self-publicist the game has seen and you knew exactly what you were doing when you swooped on that glinting symbol of disloyalty to the Glazers. For weeks, you’ll have been monitoring the mounting furore and planning exactly the image you would communicate to the world. It’s what you do best.
And you seized the moment in typically self-adulatory Beckham style. Waiting until the pitch was empty, standing like Emperor Nero, alone in the amphitheatre, milking the applause in the eager way a farmer milks a particularly well-uddered Friesian cow, then dramatically pausing to pick up the scarf. Thus quite deliberately pushing the much more deserving Wayne Rooney off the headlines (I was only surprised he didn’t leap on Rooney’s back when he scored, to share the photographic credit — a crafty move that has served Beckham well over the years).
It was the most perfectly choreographed stunt since Sacha Baron Cohen parascended, as his Austrian fashion reporter character Bruno, on to Eminem’s lap during last year’s MTV awards. And just as fake.
The Glazers are big boys and I don’t have much truck with the way they’ve allowed United to build up such potentially ruinous debt. But the hypocrisy of David ‘United ’til I die’ Beckham definitely moved me.
To extreme nausea.
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