ROCK BOTTOM

This season has been a wretched, depressing watch. But yesterday is as low as it gets

FOR those familiar with the structural decline of Old Trafford during the years of Glazer ownership, the ease with which supporters entered Manchester United’s stadium will not have been a surprise. There have been holes in the roof of the Main Stand for years. Maybe the doors no longer have locks either.

What a sad spectacle, nevertheless. Towards the end of a season played without fans, this was something new, something even more depressing. A marquee game due to be played without fans called off after disorder outside and inside England’s most famous club stadium.

Wherever next? Onwards towards something better we can only hope.

United’s fans had every right to stage a peaceful protest — as the majority did — against the club’s owners yesterday even though they know it will not get them anywhere.

The Glazers are not listening. They never were and never will. But a protest does not lose validity just because it does not bring about change. There is such a thing as protest for protest’s sake.

It was demoralising to observe, nonetheless, and that feeling only hardened when confrontations with police on the Old Trafford forecourt grew violent late in the afternoon. A lawful day of demonstration then starts to look like football hooliganism and that is the last thing the sport needs in 2021.

Despite what some may claim, this Covid-19 infected football season has been a hard watch. The sooner we see the back of it the better. It has been sport in name only.

Now, on the day of what would normally be one of the English calendar’s stand-out fixtures, all we had to observe was a breaching of the limp defences of Old Trafford and, three miles away in town, a siege outside the Lowry Hotel.

It was all understandable in motive but still rather wretched. Sport in this country has already been chopped off at the knees by the pandemic.

Now, just as the end is in sight, the behaviour of our top clubs has proved so abysmal that those who have waited so calmly to be allowed back into stadiums up and down the country finally ran out of patience.

Remember last summer when the Premier League clubs thrashed out a way to return to the field and finish the 2019-20 season? Remember the concern expressed that fans would gather inappropriately outside their club’s stadium on match day?

It turned out that we should have trusted them more. Apart from a couple of early incidents — including some regrettable scenes in Liverpool — football’s paying customers stayed away. They obeyed. They got it. YET

in the end it took something else to exhaust the reservoirs of patience. It took a kick in the stomach from those at the top.

And all we have left now is to hope that yesterday was as low as it gets.

Next weekend — in all likelihood — we will hail fabulous new champions from Manchester City. Pep Guardiola’s second wave at the Etihad promises to be a big one.

It is then possible they may face Chelsea in an all-English Champions League final. Chelsea, in turn, are due to face Brendan Rodgers’ ambitious, easy- on-the- eye Leicester in the FA Cup final.

And then we have the European Championship. Staged in part in England, in front of significant numbers of supporters no less.

That prospect felt like a world away as we watched the pictures from Old Trafford yesterday. But it is not. It is just six weeks.

Early summer and all the promise it holds cannot come quickly enough. Football has suffered for longer than we ever dared fear.