By Gil LeBreton
Star-Telegram
MANCHESTER, England — The most popular sports team in the world lives here, Old Trafford, just as it has for 102 years.
The sign emblazoned across the East Stands façade reads, “Manchester United,” a concession to the power of the franchise’s global brand.
It doesn’t look 102 years old, and most of it isn’t. What other stadium was bombed by the Germans during World War II?
Restoration and expansion have made Old Trafford both efficient and code-compliant. Sort of a Fenway Park with elbow room.
The stadium’s history, as well as its famous tenant’s, surrounds a visitor from every wall. The London Olympics understandably wanted a piece of that, and thus Old Trafford hosted international women’s soccer for the first time.
There are bigger stadiums in the world. Old Trafford seats 75,811.
And there are more handsome ones. Old Trafford has paid a price in esthetics for all its expansions.
But as shrines to the world’s most popular game go, Old Trafford is a feast for all the senses.
The red seats. The statues on the plazas. The memorial wall that commemorates the club’s 1958 plane crash. And the photos that line the hallways and concourses — a veritable who’s who of world soccer.
Moneybags United, they have called the football team as far back as the early 1900s. As the plaque in the South Stands suggests, the Munich plane tragedy made Man U the world’s team, not just Manchester’s.
Old Trafford celebrated its 100th anniversary in February, 2010. No one here seems worried that there is no dome over the playing pitch or air-conditioning for warm days. No one complains that it’s in the suburbs, as it is.
History is alive and well here, and comfortably so.
Olympic organizers could have scrubbed the non-sponsoring name off the facades, as they did at London’s O2 Arena, but they wisely chose not to.
As the big red signs say, Manchester United plays here. That’s all the Olympic ticket buyers really need to know.
One city, two teams. Ouch.This is a town divided, an uncomfortable subject to some.
It’s like the Yankees and the Mets, the Cubs and the White Sox.
Manchester United’s following crosses county boundaries and even oceans. The Manchester City soccer club, on the other hand, is the scrappy, blue-collar alternative.
“It is the team of the people, our people,” explained a man at the Manchester Piccadilly train station.
“United — that is a team for other nationalities.”
Ouch. A Mets fan couldn’t have said it any better.
As fans of the English Premier League know, Manchester United has used its considerable financial clout to accumulate 12 titles, 19 counting the British football system’s various confederations.
But in 2011-12, City won the EPL crown for the first time, a disturbance in the force that Man U fans have still not learned to comfortably acknowledge.
“Yes, they had a fabulous year,” said a volunteer at Old Trafford.
“And let’s see how they do this next season.”
Ouch.
While Manchester United plays at historic Old Trafford, 102 years old, on the west end of town, Man City’s “grounds” are City of Manchester Stadium — about half the size of its rivals’.
And where exactly is that stadium, I asked a couple of workers at Old Trafford?
They looked at each other and shrugged.
“I’m not really sure, to be quite honest,” one said. “But I believe it’s somewhere across town.”
Ouch.
A side of Canadian beefThey were robbed, they said.
Canada was seconds away from taking the heavily favored U.S. team into an overtime shootout Monday night.
But the losers ended up seething because of a rare call on their goalkeeper for holding the ball too long.
It’s in the soccer rules. Goalkeepers have six seconds to release the ball once it’s in their hands.
But custom has it that the referee first issues a warning to the delaying keeper. The infraction gives the opposing team an indirect
free kick in the penalty box.
Canadian goalkeeper Erin McLeod had been warned, U.S. forward Abby Wambach said.
“There were a few other times throughout game where she held it for 18 seconds, and for 10 seconds,” Wambach said. “The referee had warned
her before to play a little quicker.”
But the Canadians weren’t buying it.
“We feel like it was taken from us,” said Canada captain Christine Sinclair, who scored all three of her team’s goals.
“We feel cheated.”
Lost in the complaining, though, was that the holding-the-ball call was not what scored the Americans’ winning goal.
Players can’t score directly on an indirect free kick. The ball has to touch a teammate first. Megan Rapinoe, who took the shot for the
United States, executed the usual strategy — firing the ball into the tightly packed crowd, hoping it would draw a hand ball.
Which it did — another thing the Canadians didn’t agree with.
“We feel like we didn’t lose, we feel like it was taken from us,” Sinclair said.
“It’s a shame in a game like that, which is so important, that the ref decided the result before the game started.”
The referee was from Norway, by the way.
On the penalty kick that followed, Wambach knocked home the game-tying goal.
Canada had 30 more minutes, same as the U.S. team, to win the semifinal contest in overtime. Instead, the Americans dominated the ball in the two extra periods, and Alex Morgan headed in the game winner as stoppage time was about to expire.
“I can’t remember ever feeling this way,” Morgan told reporters.
Neither could the Canadians, apparently.
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