United-Liverpool: Looking Forward To The Latest Episode Of The Festival Of Hate
This is one of the biggest rivalries in football but it only became really toxic in the 1970s
Fasten your seatbelts for a bonus episode of the northwest’s biannual festival of hate. And what an episode.
Some 9,000 Liverpool fans will descend on Old Trafford to ramp up an already frenzied atmosphere when Manchester United host Jurgen Klopp’s side in the quarter finals of the FA Cup. Who says the oldest knockout competition in football is dead?
These two clubs, situated less than 30 miles apart, are the most successful in English football history. Their rivalry, which erupted into violently obsessive mania in the 1970s, remains one of the most intense in the game. Expect fireworks at Old Trafford.
There has always been competition between the two cities. Manchester was Cottonopolis in the 19th century, the capital of the region’s industrial powerhouse. Liverpool was the port that merchants from interior Lancashire needed to export their goods. That was until Manchester’s moguls built a ship canal to reduce their costs, depriving Liverpool of the business. Both Manchester clubs have sailing ships on their badges, a brazen two-fingered insult to Merseyside.
Despite the proximity of the towns, the differences are marked. The accents are easily distinguishable. Manchester’s humour tends to be downbeat and dry, Liverpool’s loud and more obvious. Both places look down the East Lancs Road at each other when defining their own achievements. They relate to one another rather than London.
All the differences become distilled in football, particularly the relationship between United and Liverpool. One anecdote sums it up. In 2006, Rafa Benitez’s team played Chelsea in the FA Cup semi-final at Old Trafford. A year earlier, Liverpool had won the Champions League in Istanbul, becoming the champions of Europe for the fifth time. This outstripped United’s two victories in the continent’s primary competition.
Liverpool fans plastered the seats of the scoreboard end with stickers saying, “Five times.” After the game, United’s cleanup crew found it hard to remove them. It was an expensive business to get the stickers off the seats before the next home game.
An Old Trafford bigwig got on the phone to his Anfield counterpart and demanded that Liverpool pay for the removal. The executive argued awhile before conceding. “Send us the bill,” he said. Then, he told the tale to anyone who’d listen, adding the jocular payoff: “That was the best money we’ve ever spent.”
Things have not always been so friendly. Yet the rivalry was relatively sedate for a long time. In 1915, players from both sides were involved in a match-fixing scandal that saved United from relegation. Matt Busby, the great United manager, was a former Liverpool captain and was held in great affection at Anfield. A wave of sympathy swept Merseyside after the Munich air disaster in 1958 and the vast majority of Liverpool and Everton fans were delighted when United won the European Cup a decade after the catastrophe in Bavaria.
Things turned ugly in the 1970s. What changed? The age of hooliganism had started and United’s Red Army were the poster boys for the new era. After the team were relegated in 1974, United spent a season in the second tier and their vast away support swamped and terrorised towns not used to hosting big clubs. When they came back up, the Red Army were targets for everyone.
At the same time, a new, young generation of supporters were growing up. They were either too young to remember the impact of Munich or born after the disaster. Much like the modern disaster-chanting youngsters who think Hillsborough taunts are “banter,” the youth of the mid to late 1970s thought it was acceptable to use the air disaster and the deaths of United players and staff to score points on the terraces. This was particularly prominent on Merseyside. Once the toxicity started, it soon went off the scale.
The ugliness reached its peak – or, perhaps, nadir would be a better way of putting it – in 1985. United played Liverpool at Goodison Park in the semi-final of the FA Cup. Those who were there still speak in awe about the violence of the day.
Two pubs near Goodison were wrecked. Police lost control of the situation before the game and never regained a grip. There was fighting in every section of the ground before, during and after the match. Golf balls with nails hammered into them were thrown from section to section, magnesium flares fired at close range into opposition fans and Stanley knives were the weapon of choice for hand-to-hand fighting. The ugliness was extreme. There were no civilians. Both sides threw themselves into the violence with gusto.
The Liverpool Echo reported that 46 people were arrested and Walton Hospital had its busiest afternoon for years, with 37 fans requiring emergency treatment, at least five of them for knife wounds.
The game ended in a 2-2 draw with a replay at Maine Road four days later. Both sets of supporters seemed to realise that the behaviour in and around Goodison was too extreme. Things had gone too far. There was less trouble at the replay. Everyone stepped back from the brink.
The semi-final was a grim forerunner of disaster. Heysel happened a month and a half later.
The intensity of the rivalry on the terraces came down a notch – but only a notch. The next season, the United players and staff were sprayed with a noxious substance as they entered Anfield.
Ironically, the previous night New Order, The Fall and The Smiths performed a benefit gig at the Royal Court in support of Liverpool City Council, who were involved in a standoff with Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Government. The concert, titled From Manchester With Love, was a rare show of solidarity.
Politically, Merseyside likes to think of itself as a left-wing region. Manchester, however, was radical when Liverpool was still dominated by the merchant classes and known as Torytown. Still, the cities have much in common, especially in a political sense.
As for football, the intensity of the dislike remains. The Luis Suarez-Patrice Evra incident 13 years ago illustrates how much it distorts things. Suarez behaved in an obviously racist manner towards Evra but Liverpool and the vast majority of their supporters twisted themselves in knots to excuse and defend the Uruguayan bigot.
Liverpool fans checked in their decency at the turnstiles. Might it have been different, though, if the victim of the abuse had not been a United player? Who knows?
The emergence of City notwithstanding, United-Liverpool is still the biggest rivalry in the country and one of the most intense in the sport. It has an edge that makes it thrilling. The atmosphere at Old Trafford will be one to savour.