YOU can count on the fingers of the hands of the statue of the Venus di Milo the amount of times I have rejoiced in anything emanating from the dark side, namely Old Trafford.

Yet, on Monday night when the Man Hooverers-up of titles perished to their noisy neighbours, and still reigning Premier League champions Man Citizens, I was cheering – and not simply about the result.

The kick-off to the all-Manc clash was not, I say again, not, preceded by a minute’s silence for a former Prime Minster who had died earlier that day.

Whether it was an oversight, whether it was a chance happenstance, whether it was a calculated decision, I care not. Old Trafford did not pay tribute to Baroness Thatcher.

The time-honoured tradition of a minute’s silence for someone’s passing has been bastardised enough over the last few years without it being cheapened yet further by any sort of remembrance for a woman who did more harm to sport, and in particular football, than almost any PM before or after her decade-plus of divisive, dismissive and for many innocents, despicable, rule.

The lack of any tribute to the MP for Finchley – how apt the name of that constituency is given it conjures a wizened madam from a Charles Dickens cast-litany of villainy – meant that no precedent was set for this weekend.

For barely had the pre-kick off absence of tribute in Manchester died down when former sports ministers who served under the Baroness chipped in with how disrespectful it was not to have paid respect and that this weekend each ground should resound to the sound of silence in memory of a woman who once described British football fans as “feral”.

She never singled out those idiots and hooligans of the 1980s, who were in the minority, but tarred all football fans with the same damaging, derisory brush.

No surprise then that such sneering, lip-curling disregard straight from the highest office in the land was reflected within the police who treated all football fans, regardless of age, gender, colour, class and creed as animals to be corralled, cornered, penned in, rushed through, pushed out – just so much dirt to be swept under the carpet.

How gigantic that carpet was only came to light with the recent revelations of the Hillsborough Independent Panel.

When even her own Home Secretary Douglas Hurd informed her that, after the interim Taylor Report into the 1989 disaster, the South Yorkshire police force was to blame for the tragedy that was to claim 96 lives, she baulked at the very notion how that could be the main thrust of the official version.

So the appalling lie, the despicable cover-up, the conspiracy of fabrication gathered enough strength to besmirch innocent victims and their families for a full generation.

Before justice was finally glimpsed with the release of the HIP report of just six months ago, Hillsborough at least ended Thatcher and her government’s obsession with identity cards, which was nothing more than a central government, Big Brother controlling of civil liberties. Thatcherism = totalitarianism.

The shrieking Maggieek did not just confine her prejudices to football.

There was her haranguing of Great Britain athletes to fully back a boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow in line with her specially-related American allies. Athletes of more stern stuff than the so-called Iron Lady, including a certain Seb Coe, refused to pander to shrill government interference and indeed returned draped in gold and glory as he had just last year when, as Lord Coe, he masterminded what many have called the greatest Olympic Games of all time.

And also in Maggieek’s pell-mell, helter-skelter dash to free market forces like some harpy cracking open Pandora’s Box, another part of her sporting legacy was to pave the way for school sports-fields to be sold off to speculators.

Shamefully, successive governments of whatever hue have continued to oversee such a short-term policy that spits in the face of Olympic Games legacy.

So the idea of a minute’s silence at any sporting venue this weekend for someone who viewed sport as at best, an irritant, at worst, a phenomenon of inclusive social inter-action that she just could not fracture, is damnably preposterous.

And how would any such act of remembrance for the Boudicca of business be treated at, say, football grounds in Rotherham, Newcastle, Middlesbrough, Barnsley, Sheffield, Liverpool, Manchester, and the entire nation of Scotland? Minute’s silence? Shush off.