Football FanCast columnist Chris Mackin looks ahead the Chelsea United final in Moscow and is in somewhat of a quandary.

I got in a daft argument with a Manchester United fan watching their game against Barcelona in the pub the other night. Obnoxiously talking loudly enough for everybody to hear and clearly insecure about his support for a team who play their home games a two hour and forty minute car drive from our local, he was convincing nobody, least of all himself, when he said that he'd spent the entire match "kicking every ball".

Politely ignoring his tenuous claims of uber-fandom, I decided to take a different tact: "Were you also kicking Messi every time he had the ball?" I asked, nicknaming his team "the Bolton Wanderers of Europe" and carrying myself with the miss-judged confidence one often feels after six pints of Guinness. "Oh, aye, you ever seen your team play Barcelona in the Champions' League son?", he asked all menacingly and, setting aside the concern that there was a big twist coming and he was suddenly about to get all Darth Vader and assume rightful parental ownership of me, I replied "what, in the ground you mean? Only twice. You?"

It was the type of sizzling byplay and mirth inducing banter anybody familiar with watching football matches in the company of those who don't share your allegiances will be used to but it did help cement my wish for anybody other than Manchester United to win this year's Champions' League. Well, apart from Liverpool naturally, a football club so pompous and maddeningly in love with themselves that watching them induces the same kind of queasy feeling in the pit of your stomach you normally associate with locking yourself out of your house dressed in only your underwear.

But Chelsea? Yeah, I felt could just about stomach the prospect of Chelsea winning it. I know the parish could have me burnt at the stake or pelted with stones for even thinking such a thought but, damnit, if I haven't become ever so slightly tolerant of Chelsea in recent weeks. There's something disturbingly tacky about the way people have gone after Drogba and Grant (and, HA!, wasn't it side splittingly hi-lari-ous when he was visibly shaken haven been bundled to the ground by an athlete half his age?) and, though I must stress that at no point has my stance on them ever slipped beneath deep antipathy for everything they stand for, the way they've been beaten about by sticks by the media all season has induced a certain amount of careful sympathy in me; more a reaction to the people attacking them than the club itself, it's like you can feel sorry for some poor sod being spat at and abused as he leaves a courtroom without necessarily warming to him.

So there I was; prepared to overlook Ashley Cole's idiotic wristband (is there some sort of Facebook group dedicated to hating this item of sportswear? There should be and joining it should be a requisite of registering to the site in the first place) and the disgusting price they charge away supporters at Stamford Bridge and the shocking percentage of their fans who apparently think it acceptable to wear sunglasses in public, I was just about to plunge myself firmly in the camp marked ‘Chelsea' and then I remembered...Tim Lovejoy. Now I don't know what to think.

I've spoken to friends nursing similar concerns and we briefly discussed the concept of absolute neutrality. It's an interesting idea but how on earth would it work? People have been very outspoken about Alan Green's exposure as a Liverpool fan in recent months and whilst it betrays a lack of imagination to attack a man for being interesting and opinionated it also beholds commentators to a bizarre set of standards it's almost unthinkable to impose on ourselves- a dispensation of loyalties would make football unwatchable wouldn't it? What would you do with your hands? Even matches like the European Champions' League final would be viewed through the same barely interested eyes that sat half heartedly through the dreadful last season of ‘Friends' just to see how they ended it.

"You could just not watch it" people have sighed in response to my addled fretting but briefly forgetting our mandate to be hip and trendy and oh-so-righteously-cynical that's not really an option is it? A few years ago I was unable to watch some England match or other and spent an enjoyable next day disagreeing vehemently with everybody's opinion on every aspect of it; it was a fun experiment but isn't sustainable as an outlook on the game- you miss, say, three major televised matches and you are hopelessly out of the loop, suddenly Richard Bacon on Radio Five is talking down to you and attempting to educate you on a sport you are already starting to feel disenfranchised with- it's the beginning of a grim process and will eventually end up like the rest of them, bemoaning live football getting in the way of Coronation Street again.

So, it appears the only thing for is to hope they both lose. Whether this is workable or not is one thing, but we're off to a good start. The farcical set of circumstances that has lead to both supporters having an almighty task of actually getting to the game is already beginning to tarnish the experience for them and I could just about handle the prospect of them all descending on my local to watch it if it meant as few of them as possible were having a European Final day to remember.