Postponement is not an option, tonight’s game has to go on

My native city is a place of drive, determination and above all, football, so it is right to play

The poet Dave Scott, who goes by the pen name @arghkid, is one of Manchester’s most fervent advocates. A line from his poem 99 Memories, commissioned by Uefa to mark United’s presence in the Europa League final, is spray-painted on a wall in a building site in Mayfield, near the city centre.

“A haven for heathens, hoodies and hipsters, hijabis and Hebrews, high-brow intellectuals and however-you-sexuals, it’s home to all.”

That is the place anyone who was brought up in Manchester knows: a town that is gutsy, grimy, often grim for sure, but fundamentally open, optimistic and warm of heart. It is a place of drive and determination, of renewal and reinvention. A place not to be cowed by the depraved misconceptions of fundamentalism.

In the sickening, gut-churning aftermath of the Manchester Arena bombing, when children were targeted by some despicable moron in an attempt to make perverted political capital, the challenge is how best to respond. As it was after the IRA bomb which tore the heart out of the city in 1996, when the overriding urge locally was not just to carry on undeterred, but to make the place better.

Back then it sparked architectural rebirth. This time there is the immediate opportunity to prove that such murderous assaults on the city’s way of life will not succeed, that tolerance and liberality and determination will not be undermined.

And for Manchester that means carrying on with the football. It means that the most appropriate memorial for the 22 who died and the many more who were injured in the Arena outrage is for Manchester United’s match against Ajax in the Europa League final to go ahead as planned tonight in Stockholm. Uefa’s decision to continue with its plans is absolutely right: there can be no thought of postponement.

This is now a match that matters beyond mere silverware. Because football is the game that identifies Manchester more than anything else, this is what gives the city global renown. Ask anyone in Kuala Lumpur, Kampala or Khartoum what they know of Manchester and they will answer with one word: football. It is football that is used to sell the local universities to foreign students, it is football that brings in trade, that gives jobs and purpose and industry. It is football that is the city’s ambassador. Where once cotton ruled, now it is football.

So to play a match so soon after such outrage is not callous. Rather it is the sharpest, most effective public metaphor for the city.

And in Manchester, this has happened before. On Feb 6, 1958, eight members of the United team were killed in a crash at Munich airport. A fortnight later, the team ran out on to the Old Trafford turf to play in an FA Cup tie against Sheffield Wednesday. Two of the players that day had been on board the plane on which their colleagues perished.

Over the decades since, there have been those who suggested that the return to normality came too quickly, that the trauma was not properly cauterised, that proper respect was not afforded to those who had died.

But history insists it was absolutely the right thing to do. What it said was that defeat was not an option, that the club would continue onwards, that the future was to be embraced, not delayed. And part of the reason for United’s worldwide renown now lies in the boldness of that response.

Of course, in the grand scheme of things football, like all sport, is irrelevant, what happens in leagues or cups meaningless compared to the lives of young people, taken away with such cruel dispatch. Sport can never be anything other than symbolic. But the point is that there is no better time for that symbol to be flourished. In these circumstances, football has real purpose.

Because albeit under a gathering cloud, this is the opportunity for Manchester to demonstrate its worth, its solidarity, its meaning. It is not a case of carrying on with your own concerns blind to the feelings of others. It is a case of boldly sticking two fingers up to the perpetrators of evil.