There’s a bee in my bonnet; about football and the fortunes currently flooding the top levels of the game. For my sins, I was brought up to follow Manchester United and occasionally I bore people by telling them this: when I first started going to Old Trafford, in the early 1950s, if I got the right buses to Old Trafford on match days, Roger Byrne, who played left back for United and England, would be on the same bus. We both lived in down-at-heel Gorton, east Manchester, before Roger and his family upgraded to a council house in posh Burnage. He was my first hero. I could relate to him, along with the rest of the Busby Babes who perished with Roger at Munich.
After several decades on the road, as it were, I moved back to Gorton 17 years ago. These days, I have new heroes in the game, having given up on the excesses of the Premier League a while back. I know times change, and I wouldn’t expect to share the same bus as the current football stars, but it would be nice to think we shared the same planet.
My current football idols are the men and women who give up their time to run clubs at the grassroots. Men like the secretary of Reddish North End, the club where two of my grandsons play. Terry, though retired, currently works a seven-day week, registering the players of the 36 junior teams who wear the club shirt. He and three other volunteers work their socks off to keep the club running smoothly and provide a terrific focal point for the 400 or so kids who benefit from their time and toil.
Yet disgracefully, when the likes of Manchester United and City spend tens of millions on players, who then earn hundreds of thousands in weekly wages, Reddish don’t get a penny from the Premier League or the FA. They rely entirely on subscriptions and local sponsors. (So if anyone can spare £500 to sponsor a team for two years, please get in touch.)
On the estate where I live now, the kids are still all football daft. But again, shamefully, there are fewer public playing fields in the area now than when I was a nipper. The kids are off school, but very few of them actually go on holiday. So for them, summer in the city means playing in the streets from dawn until dusk. And though they swear allegiance to United and City, they are unlikely to be able to afford to go to a game. Although my family was poor, I managed to find the one shilling and sixpence that got me into Old Trafford when I was their age.
Gorton was once at the very hub of Manchester’s industrial wheel where, in my childhood, thousands of skilled engineers plied their trade. All gone, of course, and employment-wise, the area is now a wasteland. But the joy of my patch lies in its close proximity to the Peak District, once coined the lungs of the industrial north. On a good day, I can be on the edge of the Dark Peak in under half an hour.
I had a long hike up there last week, starting from the old quarry on Kinder Road in Hayfield. And as always, when setting off, I paid silent homage to some more of my heroes, those who took part in the mass trespass on Kinder Scout in 1932. The five ringleaders went to prison, for daring to tread on land owned by the Duke of Devonshire and barred to the masses, so that his grace and other nobs could shoot grouse for a few days each August. Three weeks after the protest, 10,000 men and women marched in nearby Castleton and that mass action led, in 1951, to the creation of the first national park, the Peak District being the first. Because of them, me and the rest of the lower orders are allowed to breathe in that fresh, clean and free air.
In my book, compared to the likes of Benny Rothman, who led the Kinder Scout protest and the stalwarts of Reddish North End, the pampered prima donnas of the Premier League don’t rate a mention.
• Eric Allison is the Guardian’s prison correspondent
