Tackling the Tossers

Maybe Manchester City's fans have as much money as the owners these days. Certainly throwing loose change at the likes of Wayne Rooney is a genuine waste of time. Wayne probably smiles to himself when he remembers the days when he'd have gladly picked it up and toddled down to a lady of the night for some entertainment. Word has it when Wazza first visited Turin and heard he was to playing the Old Lady he took some extra Euros with him.

Love of your club and hatred for its rivals are two sides of the same coin, which may well be a metaphor too far for the knobhead who lobbed one at a celebratory Rio Ferdinand. There are always those who take things too far and once again it's the honest Johns who swear quietly into their half-time Bovrils who are getting lumped in with the louts.

It's a shame cos the Manc derby had much to admire in it, apart from Mario Balotelli. I dunno if it's the haircut but increasingly Mario plods about like a truculent dinosaur, and probably finishes about as well as your average deinonychus n all. (I have a 9-year-old son, I know about these things).

Whatever you think about Carlos Tevez - and that'll be many more thoughts than the little gaucho has had in his entire life - you can't deny that he's ten times the player Balotelli is, which means he's half the player Balotelli thinks he is. Why Mancini persists with his fellow Italian is one of the great conundrums of British football.

(The others are: 'How Come The FA Aren't Imposing Retrospective Three-Match Bans On Diving Little Cheats Like Santi Cazorla?' and 'Jordan Henderson - Why?')

That aside it was end-to-end stuff and Fergie's positive team selection had a lot to do with that. Every season feels like it has to be his last and yet he still manages to get most of the important decisions right. It's infuriating. You do feel that whenever he does leave - and despite huge and grudging admiration I'll be on one end of the lever - that the next bloke is going to have the toughest job in football. Well, apart from being Roman Abramovich's manager-finder general.

If you want to understand the difference in commitment between the two, you could hardly do better than look at the Citeh wall for United's winner. Samir Nasri, a gifted mercenary who joined the millionaire swells last year, was just another prick in that wall. And a loose prick at that. It realy was the most effeminate attempt to block afree kick I think I have ever seen.

In fact women's teams are much more slid when they line up a wall, I reckon. Although that's possibly because there's less to protect. Nevertheless, Nasri deserves a thorough dressing-down by Mancini if only to discover whether he actually has any balls.

Lescott must be wondering quite what he's done wrong too to be replaced by Nastasic, and then Kolo Toure when Kompany came off. The big wardrobe was very good at the end of last season.

But it all led to a typically Fergiefied finish. He's like a latter-day Fagin, isn't he, leading a team of arch pickpockets as they nick win after win.

Perhaps the man most likely to succeed him upped his chances on Sunday too when Everton snatched a last-gasp win. Everton under Moyes have become a second favourite team amongst many fans simply because the manager's stuck with 'em and his team play football the way we'd all like our teams to.

Jelavic glad-handed every player on the bench when he left the park after grabbing the winner and frankly that's not a sight you'd ever see on the bench at Eastlands. That's probably why I begrudge every point Citeh get at the moment. It really is a flagrant assembly of self-interested wealth-creators, that squad. So for once I was happy to see United win.

I still don't reckon on United strolling to the title from here on in. They've got the Champs League still, which happily Citeh don't, but more than that they're not so much better than every other candidate out there - unlike, say, Saltburn's own James Arthur (he won X Factor by the way).

Mind you if Teesside could be bothered we'd win every talent competition going, man. The walls of our buildings are dripping that kind of raw soulful brilliance it's just we don't like to go on about it. NB there's a bit of irony in that statement.

Of course the throwing of missiles by the fans is going to be the main subject of conversation for the next few days and I have to say it drives me tonto. I've no doubt that much of this is laced with naked jealousy for the preposterous amounts of money these blokes earn. But that's giving it too much credence as some sort of protest.

Yes, they're overpaid. Yes, they behave like children. Yes sometimes their celebrations could be termed as 'provocative' although given similar circumstances I'd be sliding on me knees and raoring with delight too. And yes, sometimes, as with Cazorla (who seemed delighted by his deceit) they don't deserve even the minimum of respect.

But for Chrissakes most of us stopped throwing stuff at other people when we were seven years old (that school window costs my Dad a fortune to fix). I've no desire to see Rio Ferdinand's blood unless it's been delivered to drug-testers (and a good thing that would have been, eh?)

Let us not forget though, that the vast majority of footballers, even the ones wading through wonga, simply get on with the game because they love it. And in the case of both Glen Johnson and Joe Cole, they remember that fans have long memories and do the decent thing when they score against them.

All Citeh can do is find the tossers and ban them. Otherwise we'll go back to the days when Dads stopped taking their kids along and we'll all be even further in hock to Rupert Murdoch if we want to get our football kicks.