In the 1940 edition of Wisden, RC Robertson-Glasgow wrote that looking back at the last pre-war summer of 1939 was “like peeping through the wrong end of a telescope at a very small but happy world”. The cricket season had ended with handshakes and a round of draws on the first of September, the day Germany invaded Poland. It would be seven years before Wisden was published in full again, cricket having resumed in earnest with the “Brylcreem summer” of 1947, when Denis Compton batted like a lord at a picnic and spectator sport helped the nation forget what a parched, ramshackle, soot-stained state it was in behind the sheen of pageantry.
On the face of it there isn’t a great deal of shared ground between Robertson-Glasgow’s beautiful, war-shadowed image of a more vital sporting world, and the unusually strident overreaction last weekend to Manchester United’s impressive performance against West Ham on the opening day of the Premier League season. On the face of it, anyway.
United were very good against West Ham, and in a thrilling way too, with power in midfield, and speed and a razor edge in attack. Paul Pogba had one of those days you sometimes see from a certain supercharged type of athlete, where the game suddenly looks too small, time seems to stop for a moment, the entire day, the space between the moving parts stretching out around a shimmy, a change of pace, a drop of the shoulder.
Perhaps more notable than a fine opening-day performance was the wider reaction in the media and beyond, only partially checked and challenged, of premature and oddly sensual triumphalism. The suggestion bubbled up almost immediately that the league title is now within United’s grasp, that this team – a new team, a new manager, a completely altered dynamic – are “back”. All of it laced with a feeling that this is in some way a reversion to the natural order of things, the Premier League’s own lost, sunlit world waxing ever larger down the end of the telescope.
Football has its own tribal obsession with bias and partiality. Most football fans believe Manchester United or Chelsea or whoever happens to be winning at the time are favoured by referees, pundits and governing bodies. But this is something more than fandom or favour. The desire for Manchester United to win things, to lead the Premier League, to exist as its global standard bearer is a tangible thing. It has both an emotional energy and, above all, a hard commercial edge.
In a way this is simple nostalgia for the boom times. Comb through the endless wheatfields of 25-year Premier League review features and it is still striking how much of the opening two decades of English football’s great project is coloured red. We really did build this city on Manchester United, a three-way bid for global commercial supremacy borne aloft by Sky TV, the Premier League and the seductive, easily-retailed charisma of Fergie-era revivalist United.
Rupert Murdoch even tried, and only narrowly failed, to buy United in 1999. But then why wouldn’t you, out of gratitude alone? United played a major part in keeping Murdoch afloat. Back in November 1990 the new Sky TV service was losing £10m a week and threatening to harpoon the entire News International operation.
The Premier League deal saved Sky, gave it something to sell, a driver for those great, sombre mushroom-grey dishes that would spread like a fungal infection across the towers and tenement rows. Manchester United, kings of the new frontier were the face, the perfect driver, right team, manager, history.
And little wonder those who trade on the Premier League’s name and status now would welcome United winning again. They are what the Premier League has, its most lucrative headline brand. Leicester’s title win, for example, was a brilliant story. It adds to the myth-kitty. But really, this is not a vision of the commercial future when even relegation for a big team affects the viewing figures, the ad revenues, the sense of scale.
This is not a purely commercial nostalgia. There is a shared, fond, youthful memory of the age of Manchester United among people of a certain age. Just as an entire generation of people in the media owe a part of their livelihood in some small way to the United-led boom times, the golden years of the project when football really did seem to fill the skies, when David Beckham’s blond-ripped fringe, the purity of his celebrity glaze suggested a kind of unarguable victory, and when newspaper supplements and dedicated TV channels and the suffocating football-centred leisure economy began to boom in earnest.
And really, look around the basic confusion of the modern world and little wonder 1990s nostalgia is a thing generally. Nostalgia feels like a safe kind of place right now. The internet is 74% nostalgia, 18% porn, 8% nostalgic porn. Brexit is nothing if not deeply nostalgic, and nostalgic in the best way, a yearning for a thing that was never a thing anyway, at a time when chasing that thing will only destroy further the non-existent thing you’re longing to falsely recreate.
In politics Jeremy Corbyn has ridden a wave of popularity, despite the fact his notion of governing is a bit like trying with the very best intentions to set off on a really nice caravan holiday in Suffolk because you also went on really nice caravan holiday in Suffolk in 1963 – rattling down the motorway in your Morris Traveler, weaving with a puzzled expression through industrial estates and wind farms and new towns, eventually getting stuck, wheels whirring, on a large speed-bump outside Sizewell, puzzling over your dog-eared AA map, lighting a pipe, thinking vaguely about manhole covers.
Meanwhile, why not tighten those knuckles and indulge a little 25-year red-tinted nostalgia. Manchester United may or may not build on a promising 90 minutes but Sky is still losing its grip on football, just as subscription TV will in time lose its hold, consumption becoming less linear, ever further down the line from the day when another season of Manchester United in the Premier League was the equivalent of the Eagles releasing a new album or another Harry Potter coming out. Things fall apart, even as they seem to be powering themselves on to new heights. The world outside may be turning bad. But for now Manchester United are on the up, the telescope has been raised to the eye, the tiny, sunlit figures framed by its lens.