If they thought the club was going nowhere, they wouldn't be thinking along those lines, so we must be doing something right." The Northern Ireland midfielder Neil Lennon has already signed a one-year extension through to the year 2000 with the Foxes.Aston Villa are preparing a pounds 1.5m bid for the Swedish international Fredrik Ljungberg, club sources said yesterday. I'm really hopeful there will be something positive to report tomorrow or Friday."O'Neill is also confident the American goalkeeper Kasey Keller, also in the last year of his current deal, will sign a new contract - and that the club's other big-name players will sign up. "When Manchester United became a plc it ceased to be a football club and became just another business. "Murdoch's Sun lied then about fans urinating on the dead," one Mancunian fan said. "Now he's come to do the same to the living," his mate added.And then, at the end, there was a view of a different tone. Mention was made of Chris Patten's memoirs and the sacking of Andrew Neil.Notwithstanding the traditional rivalry with Liverpool, there were recollections of Hillsborough.

Once that had happened, what has happened this week became inevitable.". EMILE HESKEY is poised to end speculation about his future at Leciester City by signing a one-year extension to his contract in the next 48 hours. They talked sinisterly of 3am kick-offs to suit 50m far-east pay-per-view customers and of franchising United spin-off teams in Japan and elsewhere "It could go either way," said one fan from Somerset. "He might buy in the big names or he might do what he did in baseball and sell the big names we have, sack the manager and move the ground, as he has done with his clubs in the States."The personal vehemence against Murdoch took me by surprise (I had hitherto presumed it was confined to journalists). But there was at Old Trafford yesterday not simply the feeling that, as one fan from Essex put it: "I don't think one man should be allowed to control so much - newspapers, TV, films and now a football club." There was also a fairly sophisticated acquaintance with Murdoch's track-record of kow-towing to the Chinese and Malaysians.

Murdoch, the fans say, is not just after securing a vote at the table when it comes to setting up the European super league. It may have become the first English side to win the European Cup and then, under Alex Ferguson, have dominated English football in the 1990s.But the resistance to going global is stubborn. It may have progressed early this century to become a bastion of working-class Manchester culture. It may have become a greater institution after the Munich air disaster, and the years of Busby, Best, Charlton and Law led to the club being taken to the hearts of the nation's housewives. The local paper yesterday claimed that the club has 100 million followers around the world The idea is not fanciful. The official supporters' club has 200 branches in 24 countries There are 17,000 unofficial United web sites. Even characters in the Australian teen soap Heartbreak High are regularly seen wearing United shirts.

(Perhaps Rupert owns that, too).At Old Trafford the owner of the "Fat Cat" T-shirt was from Wiltshire. Others in the line were from Essex, Somerset and the Irish Republic. And yet there is a resistance among the fans against further transformation.Manchester United may have begun as a club formed by a railway company for its workers. Yet despite their high profile the Athletic supporters were outnumbered by United fans, many of whom were born and bred in London but who travel up for every home game.It is estimated that 18 per cent of all English football fans are supporters of Manchester United. "The furore that greeted news of the bid," the opinion column on the business pages of Mr Murdoch's Times sneered yesterday, "seemed to indicate that what was at stake was the future of a local institution, kind to children and animals."But there was more to the fans' upset than affronted local pride. Manchester United has not, of course, been a local institution for years.