STILL NOT OVER THE REVOLUTION?:

Football fans, like EU voters, want their voices to be heard (Ferdinand Mount, 25/05/2005, Daily Telegraph)

Although I had a good ticket, I did not see very much of the Cup Final. This was because the man in front of me was wearing a huge Alan Sunderland wig and kept on jumping up and down. For those not up to speed on these things, Alan Sunderland was the shaggy-haired player who scored the winning goal for Arsenal the last time they played Manchester United in the Cup Final, back in 1979. Far from having no sense of history, football fans wallow in it and love to dress up in antique costume as much as any member of the Sealed Knot.

But if my sightline was impaired, the volume of sound around me was deafening. And what 30,000 Arsenal supporters were chanting for two hours, pretty well non-stop apart from the occasional aspersion on the referee's sanity or Wayne Rooney's private life, was ''USA! USA!'' This was apparently the most offensive chant they could think of. To rub in the fact that the proudest club in Britain had been bought by an American wheeler-dealer seemed to them the best way to humiliate the Man U supporters, who themselves regarded the sale to Malcolm Glazer in precisely the same light. Two-thirds of them had come to the game dressed in inky black. In fact they had taken the trouble to avoid confusion with the club's away colours - which happened also to be black - and had excavated from their wardrobes any old unbadged black sweater or sweatshirt to serve as mourning dress. As a result, their end of the stadium looked like a vast convention of undertakers.

How deeply peculiar it is that the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave should now be the rudest word in the vast lexicon of football insults. It is even more peculiar when you reflect that Roman Abramovich, a Russian tycoon of far more mysterious origins than Mr Glazer's, was able to take over Chelsea football club without a whimper of protest (the nickname of Chelski was purely affectionate).

Nor is it as if other post-war owners of Manchester United were easily confused with the Twelve Apostles. The ex-wife of one of them, when asked whether he sailed close to the wind, exclaimed: ''Sail close to it? He is the wind!'' We should not imagine either that this startling explosion of collective anti-American sentiment was confined to the rude proletariat. On the contrary, these Cup Final tickets had face values of £50 to £100 and a street value of up to £500. Within spitting distance of me sat young investment bankers, advertising executives and television directors - representatives of the new meritocracy in fact.

A couple of days earlier I had been having lunch at a club with members of an older generation, mild gents no more in their first youth than me and of a decidedly small-c conservative disposition.

And the first thing they all wanted to say was: "Didn't George stick it to the Yanks?'' I wonder if our political elites have any idea of just how popular Mr Galloway's assault on that Senate committee has made him in the most unexpected quarters.

You do not read much about this phenomenon, because to be openly anti-American is still not the done thing, except among dyed-in-the-red-wool Lefties. The chanting of ''USA! USA!'' was noticed only in passing in the press coverage, although the noise was fierce, prolonged and fortissimo.

But this is not the first time that I have had the uneasy feeling that a particular brew of anti-Americanism is seeping into our national consciousness, not for the most part indignant, contemptuous and melodramatic like the French variety, but irritable, gloomy and resigned.