Liverpool and Manchester City: A New Rivalry For Our Times

On the Pitch, and Off

It used to be said that one thing our fans and Utd’s have in common is we both sing about Liverpool all the time! Well the same could now be said of City, as their obsession with, and even hatred of, Liverpool FC has reached the point where it at least matches that of their neighbours.

Rivalries between fans of football clubs are hardly new, of course. With Liverpool and Everton it’s obvious, it doesn’t need explaining – at least to Reds within the Merseyside area, it’s the only rivalry. They might see the Manchester lots four times a season when they play them, but they see Evertonians every day, in their workplaces, buses and trains, pubs and cafes, the radio, the paper, the local sports news. It never goes away.

Outside of Merseyside, the further away the geography spreads, the likelier it would be that Manchester United would take over as top rival.

Chelsea might crop up too, the Mourinho/Abramovich era heralding a coarse loadsamoney culture that was and still is as far removed from Liverpool’s DNA as any other club in the land. Our frequent high profile meetings with them since the Benitez/Mourinho rivalry has certainly fanned those flames.

We have a relationship based on mutual loathing with Forest, going back to the late 1970s and flaring back into life now that we’re actually playing each other again. Leeds have been arch rivals for even longer, since the 1960s and the days of Shankly and Revie. And Newcastle are coming up fast on the rails, for obvious reasons.

And then came City.

But a City unlike any we’d ever known before.

City had never been serious rivals of Liverpool, they had never really been important enough, apart from a brief flurry in the late 60s/early 70s, Francis Lee, Colin Bell, Mike Summerbee et al. They’d even been down to the third tier since. As their neighbours became all-consuming, swallowing trophies, fame and headlines, a money-making trophy-winning bloated behemoth, City were almost defined by not being them. Remember the book ‘Man Utd ruined my life’? By a City fan.

City were the product of their Maine Road environment, down-to-earth, unglamorous and unsuccessful and sort of real, at least compared to their showbiz neighbours , hemmed in by the Coronation Street terraced rows of Rusholme and the flat-roofed graffiti strewn ganglands of Moss Side. I remember me and a mate going to a League Cup semi-final 1st leg there one midweek evening in 1981. We tucked ourselves into a pub called the Beehive, right opposite the Kippax where their ‘boys’ went. The Beehive had a fair percentage of them in. We stood in the corner drinking Hydes Bitter and not saying much. Then someone burst in and shouted ‘Specials are in!” The place almost emptied. Liverpool’s football special trains – remember those days? – had arrived at Piccadilly, and they were all off for the fight. Scousers and mancs. This was all part of matchday routine back then. And City was by no means the most dangerous place to go - Leeds, Birmingham City, West Ham, Chelsea, Utd, Spurs were all more problematic. We just stayed where we were, drinking.

City’s fans then were known for their lugubrious, self-deprecatory black humour, borne out of a seemingly endless succession of failure and ridicule, of being locally second best and nationally irrelevant. In the old adage, they were modest, and had a lot to be modest about. After we’d beaten them 4-0 and 6-0 in the space of four days at Anfield in the League Cup and League in 1995, their fans inside the ground sang ‘Alan Ball’s a football genius’ about their manager.

There’s not much self-deprecation about these days.

First they moved out of Maine Road, and acquired themselves a new stadium for free, the Commonwealth Games stadium in East Manchester. A sheikh bought in, and the cash gushed in. City struck gold – or rather oil. Player after marquee player started arriving. They started competing at the top end, and winning things. Eventually, as the cash just kept coming, so did the trophies. The Premier League trophy in 2012, the first of four in eight seasons.

Just as significantly, a new breed of fans and a new attitude took root, drowning out the old school in a torrent of entitlement and expectation. The role of the media, the game’s observers, their own fans and everybody else’s, was to lavish praise on them, and the role of every other club and their fans was to be subordinate and know their place. Upstairs, downstairs.

They had got used to having the place pretty much to themselves, to be honest. The strutting cockerel, going where and doing what it pleased. After no title for 44 years, suddenly there was a succession of them, as well as any number of domestic cups. Hell they were even counting Community Shields to help with the statistics to prove how great they were and how scared people were of them.

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