Vegas is Vegas, babY: Man Utd summer 2023
Roll up for the RIDE OF YOUR EXISTENCE in my LATEST TOME: Manchester United's summer 2023 tour of New York, New Jersey, San Diego, Houston, San Diego, Las Vegas. PART ONE of FOUR, below, IS FREE
motoring through the Mojave Desert
motoring towards the neon Strip
heading for the orange-tinted sunset
the light comes down
you dream of the lilac mountains
of heat and the purple hued horizon
of the kid you will become again
for:
Las Vegas
incoming
this darkening Saturday late July American summer night
‘It is better to have less thunder in the mouth and more lightning in the hand’
Apache Tribe saying
Part 1
Vegas is Vegas, baby
there’s a 99c pizza joint
and at 9.52pm this Manhattan night
Latino families gather on the sidewalk
digging into a
a box of pepperoni pie the size of Queens
and the lights fizz
the traffic zips
and you could hardly be anywhere else
where
philly steaks get chomped at 2 dollars a throw
the life is a 2000mph whizz through the streets and the avenues rare up like the vistas of youth
AND:
across the Hudson River down from where it begins as an Adirondack Mountain beck
33.6 miles west of Jersey City
at Pingry School, 131 Martinsville Road, Basking Ridge, New Jersey 07920, 908-647-5555
this 20 July 2023
Erik ten Hag pads the lush green grassed training paddocks in Man Utd baseball cap and black and red regalia
leading training in blazing Stateside sun which makes you feel - as Jadon Sancho, Mason Mount, Kobbie Mainoo, Tom Heaton and the rest of the gang trot past in the 85 degree heat - that these moments
might
and
only
can
last
forever;
but.
the spell gets broke, the news rides in, Erik has
made Bruno Fernandes captain
has sent Harry Maguire
back to the ranks.
and on the stage of the Pingry School Macrae Theatre
Erik has switched to a grey and red Utd training strip getup
as he and the head of media, Andrew Ward, present
to Miller Bugliari, ‘the second most winningest US high school soccer coach with more than 900 (WINS)’,
a Utd shirt. then the niceties are over. the Dutchman is quizzed if Utd can at last be English champs once more in the upcoming 2023-24 season which starts in 3 weeks?
Erik doth posit:
‘We have to raise the bar – [but] by raising the bar you cannot always express that in a clinical result. We want to win every game and we have shown last season we can beat all the teams in the world. Now we have to do that consistently and that is our objective, then we will see what we have.’
hmm: managerial triplespeak or unvarnished truth-saying: YOU decide.
FOR:
what will become of Erik’s players this summer tour when they play Arsenal (New Jersey, MetLife Stadium), Wrexham (San Diego, SnapDragon Stadium), Real Madrid (Houston, NRG Stadium) and Borussia Dortmund (Las Vegas, Allegiant Stadium)?
what will become of Erik''s players in the 2023-24 campaign??
what will become of Erik???
as, the next day in a Manhattan afternoon,
Central Park looms
resplendent 57th Street
softball diamonds
where you watched softball games
in the heatbleached summer of ‘94
you were 22
you hit New York a first time
the place popped and jived
you slept for free
in a walk-in broom cupboard at Banana Bungalows Youth Hostel at 77th and Broadway
getting up and out of bed before the maids came into clean
on the
21st floor
an eyrie onto all Manhattan
72,569 New Yawwwwkers living and breathing per square mile
uptown/downtown and mid-Manhatt visions
this afternoon
Utd play Arsenal tomorrow
you quit the hotel
swerving up and into 5th
heading for the high 100s
along the side of the park
running
for Harlem
Spanish
drifts of fragrante aroma-ed blunts
and
all of
U. S. A.
is a yellow schoolbus ride
away
going east to west
zooming past the Dakota at Central Park West
did J Lennon gaze at the spire
the first
time
one gone now moment
and think::: GEE??? and F***££££@@@@???
THEN:
swigging Natalie’s natural lemonade
5$ water made of
fresh lemons
Florida cane sugar
Coney Island
comes at you on the edge of the Americas
because
there is stuff in my heart that can never be let out
Mexican coke - more cane sugar
two sparrows at Lafeyette and Great Jones
twirling
spiralling
chirruping
into
the centuries
at 57th and Lexington a homeless unsheaths and pisses
down the side of a red Ford
the time is
5.01 in the A.M.
and 5 blocks further downtown
a woman yells into her phone: ‘punks be blaming me do they!’
and
i run the width of the island West 36th to 12th to the water see Hoboken waving back from N Jersey
turn, take 40th, all the way east to gaze at Brooklyn
the East River is a tangrey
and
24 hrs later at JFK Terminal 5 drinking an 18$ IPA waiting for steak and eggs done medium/rare and scrambled
i
see again the two older gents in full tennis garb
sporting visors
on court thumping a ball at 6.26am down the road in Queens
floating across the U S of A
East Coast to West Coast
The game yesterday finished: Arsenal 0 Manchester United 2, Fernandes and Sancho the scorers;
of the latter The Guardian’s correspondent wrote:
‘Sancho sprinted past Gabriel and then rifled past Ramsdale from an angle on the right, a finish that teemed with the belief he sometimes seems to lack.’
it is 24 July.
in two days, in San Diego, Utd take on Wrexham at the SnapDragon Stadium
Next week: Man Utd’s tour hits San Diego and Houston
at the bar at Houston Airport they play
Desperado, The Eagles
the sound of the States
the sound of the soul
the sound of all the imaginations of the world
is the sound of creation