Chocolate buttons as a half-time snack? No thanks, Sir Alex

And slightly ­surprising, perhaps, to see the ­former Manchester United manager so cheerfully endorsing the “tear and share” concept. Many of us associate him more closely with continuous solo chewing – either gum or a wasp.

Timely, too, in the week that Penguin and Club lost the right to call themselves chocolate, and became, in the face of rising cocoa prices, merely “chocolate flavoured”.

Which was, perhaps, the topic of conversation as Sir Alex proffered the bag and Sir Kenny dipped in.

“Dark days for cocoa-dependent snacking, Alex.”

“Oh aye. How long before Chocolate Buttons are just… buttons?”

Small quibble about those ­buttons, though: strictly speaking, that’s a cinema snack, not a football snack. Now, as someone who retired into spectator-hood only at 71, Ferguson has come late to half-time confectionery choices. And each to his own.

Nevertheless, in the face of the wide dissemination of these Sky images, it does seem worth underscoring here that the bite-size sharing bag tends to be associated with eat-and-watch grazing, and at the football we prefer to watch, and eat only in the designated interval. Which is why, to the extent that it’s about chocolate at all, half-time is about the chocolate bar.

Which chocolate bar? Well, personally, when I started going to games, the KitKat was the law, and I went along with that. Some time around the turn of the century, though, I changed it up and went Boost, very successfully, and then had a bit of a Snickers period before getting to where I am now, which is very firmly with the Twirl. I like the Twirl for being – for now, anyway – a ­chocolate bar whose offer is unashamedly chocolate-y. Also, its “twin finger” format makes it plausible that you could share it with (for example) Sir Kenny Dalglish, though I prefer not to.

You have to remain alive to change, though, and this week I found myself experimenting. A friend who lives in an area of the north-east which we believe to be a trialling ground for new confectionery ideas – the chocolate industry’s Nevada desert, if you will – had generously sent me some samples of the new Fruit & Nut Mars bar. Clearly this melding of two titanic confectionery concepts had to be explored for what it could offer in a footballing context. And this week I did.

Massive mistake. Beneath a half-hearted drizzle of chocolate lay a niggardly tube of compressed fruit matter, with the colour and tacky texture of a squished raisin – all the signs, in other words, that I was in the presence of, not chocolate, but an “energy bar”. Sure enough, it was like eating a damp mitten. If my team hadn’t been 4-1 up at the time after an unusually free-flowing 45 minutes, I might not even have finished it.

What possessed the makers to take this project in, of all things, a health-food direction? Would love a view from Sir Alex and Sir Kenny on this. Except we know the answer: cocoa commodity prices. It’s the quiet replacement of chocolate with chocolate substitutes, Mars heading inexorably the way of Penguin and Club. And frankly, I don’t know how half-time as we know it survives this.

Walking away from the ground that night, I had to explain at length to my kids that there was a time when biting into a Mars bar took actual effort – a time, similarly, when a Twix made a snapping noise if you broke it rather than bent meekly in a mush of caramel and humectant.

They’ve heard it from me before, possibly. Nevertheless, I went on to tell them that half-time was only 10 minutes in those days – only 10 minutes to get that properly coated chocolate bar away, and yet we knuckled down and got on with it, and we were happy and, dare I say, better for it.

And, hearing all this, the minds of my kids entirely exploded. Or, at any rate, that’s how I interpreted the silence that had fallen over them like ... well, like a coating of chocolate, I suppose. But a proper, thick one.

Photograph by Jacques Feeney/Offside via Getty Images