A 7-0 hammering on Merseyside Sunday was the latest chapter in an eternal English rivalry. In the words of the Merseyside-born broadcaster Stuart Maconie, Liverpool vs. Manchester United is “a vendetta, a blood feud that’s Sicilian in intensity”.
semi-final in Sheffield. Tragedy was followed by travesty: years of police and establishment cover-ups designed to shift the blame onto the supporters. Rival fans, not least United’s, seized The Sun newspaper’s smears and ran with them, even after they were emphatically disproven. They painted Liverpool as a “self-pity city”. Whatever solidarity had existed in the past seemed to be sacrificed at the altar of tribalism.
Or, as Steve Rotheram, the mayor of Liverpool, put it more succinctly, “Basically it comes down to this: we were more belligerent, weren’t we?” In both cases, there are powerful, alluring stories: of tragedy as well as triumph. The two success stories lend themselves to a certain mythology which the two clubs have become adept at selling to the world.
Gibbons mentions the perception of United being “the media darlings”. In ‘Red on Red’, McNulty and White point to how all the national newspapers had offices in Manchester in the 1980s and how anything beyond a routine United victory would attract wishful headlines about how Liverpool’s domination was under threat.
Over the years, many historians have proposed that the Liverpool-United rivalry can be traced back to the construction of the canal, built on the insistence of a group of industrialists from Manchester and the surrounding towns, who were determined to find a way to avoid the excessive toll rates charged by the port masters of Liverpool during the depression of the late 19th century.
“These were the two biggest clubs with the biggest support, so part of the challenge became about trying to prove themselves the bigger off the pitch as well as on the pitch. There was a time in 1971 when United were banned from playing at Old Trafford and some bright spark had the idea of playing a league game against Arsenal at Anfield. Liverpool fans thought, ‘We’re not having that’, so they turned up and there was an enormous brawl on the terraces that day. And it went downhill from there.
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