Until the recent Man Utd protests against Ineos and the Glazers started up again, the perennial fight between different club factions spent most of the year bubbling away not around Old Trafford but in…. Barnes?!
This bucolic London suburb, chock full of celebrities like Holly Willoughby, Gary Lineker and Stanley Tucci, was the unlikely venue for pro and anti Glazer factions to face off.
And the even more unlikely epicentre for this showdown? Barnes Bowling Club.
“Step through the wooden gate of this long-established Bowling Club and time stands still”, says its promotional intro. And this has been the case for the luminaries of the old Green and Gold protest. A big group of insurgents – even Lord Jim O’Neil, whose Red Knights consortium in 2010 failed to dislodge the American parasites – have been able to meet for convivial pints to discuss how nothing they’ve done has managed to get the Glazers out.
And yet this was threatened this summer when a new member tried to sign up for the club. Like Kevin Pieterson at nearby Sunningdale, the wannabe player was blackballed.
But, much like the Green and Gold movement, this display of protest also fizzled out, as eventually the membership got rubber stamped.
The new member? The man who advised the Glazer family on their takeover nearly 20 years ago, then went to on to run Man Utd ’til 2022 – Mr Ed Woodward! |