Boo Boys

Charlton 0 Manchester United 3

My trip to Barcelona was most agreeable, thank you, and as I had rather foreseen, I did not have access to a computer. My friends had made vague noises about an Internet café somewhere, and there was always the Barcelona branch of my employers, but I am on holiday, and I reckoned that if I did find a computer, I would spend hours and hours looking at the same pages that I look at when at home, and thus waste the opportunity to wander through the streets of old Barcelona and enjoy the benefits of a break from routine.

So it was that the night of this latest debacle found me in the company of two charming ladies, both of whom have been close friends of mine for years, wining and dining and strolling round the Barrio Gotic, and I only fleetingly had time to wonder how things were going in SE7.

On returning to the hotel I flicked through the TV channels to see if I could find Sky Sports, but they didn't have it, so as I was tired after a long day's travelling and my evening out, I left it at that, and it wasn't until the late morning of the next day, when I found myself in the Ramblas with all the other tourists, and saw the stacks of foreign papers available on all the newsstands, that I was able to discover what had happened. I have got out of the habit of reading newspapers since the Internet came into our lives a few years back now (crikey, in fact it is almost ten years, I now realise) and so it didn't occur to me to buy one, but I did glance at a few back pages until I saw the result. Oh well, 0-3; did anyone expect much more? Charlton's last league game but one had been against Manchester United, in mid-May, and that had produced a 4-0 thumping.

At this stage I still had vague notions of dropping into an Internet café, had one presented itself, so ruefully resigned myself to finding out the details later. If Charlton had won, or even drawn, I might well have been tempted to buy a paper, but as things were there would have been no point. I knew what the reports would be like. The media will always rejoice when things go the way they expect them to, and that means that whenever Manchester United play teams like Charlton, Manchester United win. If I read a report about a Charlton defeat, what I am looking for is consolation: we played well and were unlucky; the referee was against us; two of their goals were offside; that kind of thing. But I knew that €3 or so for an English paper would not have procured me that kind of information.

There would be Manchester United triumphalism; personality stuff revolving round one or more of their famous players, and if Charlton's angle were taken at all. it would just be pointing out that after 2 games, Charlton are bottom of the table and what price the new manager now? (Of course in the old days, before computers made calculating league tables instantaneous, no tables were printed in the papers till 3 games had been played, as they were utterly misleading, and remember, at this stage last season Charlton were top with 6 points out of 6).

But in fact I did get to see a paper in the end. I joined my friends for lunch, and one of them slightly shamefacedly said she'd been tempted by a scandalmongering headline on the front page of the Daily Mirror about Victoria Beckham, so while she went off to powder her nose before we paid the bill and left the restaurant, I scanned the report.

Yes, it pointed out that Dowie was having problems, but of course the real news story, which I hadn't thought of, was the fact that it was Cristian Ronaldo's first away appearance in the UK since the winking affair during the World Cup. Apparently the England-supporting Charlton fans booed him every time he touched the ball, so, the Mirror journo was able to use the 'silencing the boo-boys' technique, so beloved of unimaginative sports writers, last noted by me when Spotty brought his Enormous Vast Huge Big Club, Newcastle United, to town in the spring.

And any information that might be a consolation to me was lacking, and yet, as The Inspector points out, things were not all bad.

Anyway, this afternoon, it is Bolton at home, and of course last season there was a jinx which meant that hardly any points were amassed at the expense of Lancashire / Manchester / Merseyside clubs, and Charlton's recent record against Bolton is not good in any case. But as always, one must hope for the best.