B*ro 5-0 U's: No Pride, No Passion, No Fight

Mark Bonner said after the game they'd travelled to London Road wanting to make history. An utterly inept U's side certainly did that, but not in the way Bonner wanted. @vinylperez picks up the pieces.

There's no beating around the bush about what happened on Saturday is there? We might as well get straight down to it - United were woeful. This was a local derby let's not forget, and one we're never going to hear the end of. This wasn't just a defeat, it was a humiliation - they took the piss out of us and we did nothing about it.

Who comes out of that game with anything more than a 1/10? No one. There's a number of players who should have wore the shirt for the last time on Saturday but we all know that won't be the case. We'll make a couple of changes and carry on against Northampton as if nothing happened. As if we haven't just suffered the worst Derby defeat in our history.

We've dined out on the 5-1 at London Road, Dion Dublin and all that, for over thirty years now. We've sung about it regularly, laughed at B*ro for all their failures over the years - Mile Jedinak, PPG, the 'see you next season' tweet, collapsing against Sheff Weds - and all that stuff, but that's gone now. Consigned to the history books by this shower of shit we had out there on Saturday. Even though they've been above us in the League for a almost generation we always had that 5-1 to throw back at them. This is their 5-1, and it's one better. They're going to laugh at us for the rest of their lives.

If Mark Bonner, Cambridge United fan Mark Bonner couldn't raise the players for this game then what hope is there? Why didn't he go into the opposition dressing room where there were 11 footballers suitably up for the derby game - they knew they'd most likely win, but still played like they were playing for their lives, even though they didn't need to. Why didn't he go into the stand down the side where there were 1,600 people for whom this did mean something, for whom this meant more than anything? Any one of us could have given the team talk for this game - it doesn't matter if they've got better players, we were Cambridge United, we always had fight. We always had passion. We always had a sense of what it meant to represent this club against the odds, and get a result when needed. We don't any more. You might think I'm being hysterical, and maybe I am, but the manner of this defeat is still raw.

You know what? I could have accepted a heavy defeat, if we had left nothing out there on the pitch. If we'd have lost 5-0 but finished with 9 men on the pitch I'd have taken that. I'd have been upset, sure, but if we'd have given them a game then fair enough, the better team on the day won. We didn't even get a yellow card. At least three of those goals could have been stopped with a well-timed foul or challenge. Where are the bastards in our squad? Who in our team is going to make things difficult for opposition attackers? Where are those who understand that we were playing Peterborough United and nothing less than 110% will not be tolerated? Their players seemed to understand it. We didn't get close to them, they walked through our defence time and time again, with no-one willing or able to stick one on them, to let them know that we're Cambridge United, and we're here to give you a game.

It's been a while since we've had players we've accused of just being here to pick up a paycheck but it looks like we're back to that again. We've put in a number of poor results over the past few seasons, but we've always bust a gut in the end. We're never going to be able to compete with some of the sides in this division, but we can at least try, for that reason alone, Saturday was unforgivable. I'm not going to single anyone out, no-one comes out of the loss with any credit, and if these players had anything about them they'd be using their wages this week to refund those 1,600 passionate fans who had to endure that.

There's lots of questions to be asked of a lot of club staff coming out of Saturday, and there's going to be some answers we might not want to hear. I don't ever want to hear club management praise that lot for anything ever again. We need to make things horrible for the teams we play against. If we can't out-play them then we've got to out-fight them, to bully them, to rough them up and make them wish they'd stayed at home. We're too nice to be doing that, and we need to change that straight away. I'm not going to attempt to answer any of these questions now, because I'm still too angry, but there's no way this can't be a line in the sand. Anything less than three points at Northampton will be unacceptable.

Man of the Match: No-One.

Soundtrack of the Match: Radiohead - Let Down