I was born a Man United fan and have followed them for over half a century, writes Eric Allison.
Going to the Theatre of Dreams and seeing the Reds win, lose or draw was the sort of experience guaranteed to make the pulse quicken as each new season dawned.
It is sad to report, then, that over the last few years, a lot of the gloss has gone out of the game in general - and out of Man U in particular. It isn't just the Malcolm Glazer takeover - the damage was done once we became a PLC. Saddam Hussein could have bought us, had he been minded to - though it sticks in the throat for a mega-rich resident of Florida to pick us up like some sort of last-minute Christmas present. It's the way in which, over the years, the game has drifted further and further away from its roots.
What may turn out to be the final straw for me came with the introduction this season of a complete ban on smoking throughout the stadium. It began a while ago when they banned the weed from the seated areas. A bit much, I thought - especially when the game was in the dying minutes and we were hanging on to a one-nil lead by the skin of our teeth or the paint on the crossbar.
But they had a point, I suppose; the seats are a bit squashed together and your neighbour may have not been particularly partial to a passive lungful of Golden Virginia. And at least you could nip down the stairs at half-time for your blast of nicotine.
This season they've gone the whole hog - smoking is banned throughout the stadium. "After consultation with our supporters," they say. Well, nobody consulted this supporter, nor any of my acquaintance.
What's a smoking ban got to do with the game sliding away from its roots, you may ask?
Well, I'm sorry to fly the class flag here, but if football isn't a working class game, then no game on earth is. For Manchester United, read Newton Heath Loco. A true works team, watched by workers.
Take a look at some of those marvellous black and white images of football crowds of yesteryear. The first thing you'll probably notice is the headgear - virtually every supporter wore a hat. Flat, mostly, followed by trilbies and bowlers. Then look at the huge number of men in overalls; workers watching workers, bearing in mind that Old Trafford was on the edge of what was then the biggest industrial estate in the world.
Look again closely and see the thousands of thin coils of smoke curling upwards. Look harder at enough pictures and you're bound to see some goalkeeper or other having a not so sly drag while the match action is at the other end.
For heaven's sake, when I first started going to Old Trafford, (sometimes sharing a bus from Gorton with Roger Byrne, then skipper of United and England, who earned about as much as a time-served engineer), the whole world smoked.
And there's the rub, you see. Nobody could or should try to justify smoking, but it's a legal addiction and the vast majority of addicts are working class. We die sooner, saving the NHS the price of nursing us through our old age. We pay through the nose in tax. So the least you can do is to let us smoke ourselves to our early graves while we watch our game - the game spawned in grimy, fume-filled factories which - of course - killed more of our forefathers than Woodbines ever did.
