Embrace a new Dark Age for Sheffield United

HOTFM is a new column on The Pinch written by editor Sam Parry. Today's edition is about young people.

On Monday evening, David and I attended the Football Supporters’ Association awards to show our faces at the ritual disappointment of losing in the “Fan Media” category. By Tuesday morning, we had sung the GCB song on karaoke in front of NTT20 pod (very on brand), gone head-to-head with members of the Football Cliches pod on Mario Smash Football, before ending the evening with a large Big Mac meal and an expensive taxi home at 3am.

Full to the brim with inspiration and aspiration after seeing so many talented people, I decided to add a new regular feature to The Pinch with this fortnightly column: Hot Off The Fax Machine or HOT FM, for the heads.

For this first column, I have penned a short piece on periodically bringing back the Dark Ages of Sheffield United. In future, this column will be for paid subscribers only. So if you like it, please sign up for less than a pint per month.

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Embrace a new Dark Age for Sheffield United and for the future…

Sam Parry

Hot off the fax machine: Sheffield United did not score a good goal between 1996 and Michael Brown. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Now, you’re thinking Vas Borbokis. I’m thinking that too because I’m 33. But there are some amongst us — young people — whose earliest memories of life as a Blade are an enlightened highlights package of pirouetting star-boys, third-man runs and thundercrack strikes. Every generation needs its Dark Age, and that’s why I want another return to the Premier League.

In the real Dark Ages, if you survived plague, war, and famine, your reward was probably another plague. At least pestilence was reliable back then. In Sheffield United’s periodic Dark Age, if you survived a game you were lucky to come away with the memory of a back post header, and those were treasured, truly, like a hard drive full of bitcoin.

We just didn’t score good goals, did we? They never happened. For the longest time, in my most formative childhood years, we never managed those opulent efforts. “Acrobatics” were the preserve of Kelly, Tracey or Kenny. “Unbelievable” was what the opposition could do. Sheffield United was set-piece heft and big bastard forrads.

Of course, Michael Brown came along in my teenage years and everything changed. Not only did we score bangers, but we regularly scored bangers. And not just Brown, but Tonge and Jagielka and even Rob Kozluk once.

Still, my personal Dark Age set me up for life. It gave me a foundational understanding of attrition, boredom, and the quizzes in the match programme. The grind is good for the soul. I recall one game where I read more words in a sentence of graffiti on the Kop than successful passes made by a Warnock side. Young people — young Blades — need and deserve similar experiences.

Who is this generation to wile away their 90 minutes actually enjoying the football? It’s not only wrong but dangerous. Such undeniable pleasure can only meet its opposite as young boys and girls become teenage boys and teenage girls, and then as adults on trains to away games, instead of pithy ironies such as, “ahh, well you don’t remember Gus Uhlenbeek”, they will moan and groan about how they recall the good old days, full of worldies, limbs, scenes and the steady snuffing out of once-‘lit’ performances.

What a world we leave behind for them. Plastics poisoning their TikToks, petrochemicals in their FIFA packs and, worst of all, nostalgia before their time. Bring back the Dark Age. Bring back the Premier League’s campaign of despair, where oppositions dominate the ball, where excitement is but a needle in a stack of many needles, and where even the most uninspiring goals play hostage to a Virtual Assistant Referee.

The Dark Age, like passing your driving test or drinking in the park, is a rite of passage. Short of promotion, I fear young Blades might miss out. And I have to wonder if the muted volume at Bramall Lane, with chants that stick around like cobwebs in a clean freak’s house, reflects the forlorn exhale of Gen X and Millennials as they pass on the one thing they should not: the idea that Sheffield United will do anything but disappoint.

So I stay to Chris Wilder: deliver us the future our football club needs—promotion and hope, before the Premier League and the delicious despair of one more much-needed Dark Age.