Manchester United in the United States
Here’s a great article in the Guardian that should appeal to football fans (that’s “soccer” in the States) interested in the “Gulliver’s Travels” quality of Manchester United’s recent trip across the Atlantic to try to build up interest in the game there. Superstars like Ruud van Nistlerooy and Ryan Giggs able to simply walk out of their hotels and check out the city, unharrassed, because nobody over there even recognizes them! (Strangely, the most-recognized player on the Manchester United team was Tim Howard, the new second-string goalie who’s redeeming feature was that he happens to be American himself.) And about how, often enough, their “checking out the city” was highlighted by visits to the excellent local strip joints – just enough excitement and aesthetic reward, it seems, for the lads who otherwise had to suffer through a tour of four games (all won handily) in a country whose fans and whose journalists still, it seems, don’t really understand or appreciated their sport – and so, by extension, their team.
