curled a shot around the United defence to score the winner and seal Liverpool’s third consecutive League Cup.
Civic co-operation in anticipation of greater wealth ensured that the world’s first passenger railway was opened between the cities in 1830, but by late 1878, the year Manchester United were formed as Newton Heath, a worldwide trade depression left Manchester grappling with economic stagnation and labour migration. Liverpool was blamed for charging excessively high rates for importing the raw cotton spun in Lancastrian mills and Manchester’s solution was to give the city direct access to the sea to export its manufactured goods, thus cutting out the middle man of Liverpool.
A canal big enough to carry ships was proposed, which infuriated Liverpudlians. They tried to ridicule the plans out of existence and Liverpool-based backlash against the ship canal ranged from music hall songs and pantomime references to reasoned economic argument. None of it prevented the Manchester Ship Canal being built and the city became Britain’s third busiest port, despite being forty miles inland. This is why the United crest has a ship on it. But this was only a temporary respite for Manchester.
With the end of the British colonies and the introduction of container ships, Liverpool’s port became less viable, while the disintegration of the textile industry hit Manchester and both cities suffered generations of economic decline and depopulation. Extreme deindustrialisation and suburbanisation was coupled with growing unemployment and poverty among the proletariat. The nadir was marked in 1981 by violent riots in Manchester’s Moss Side and Liverpool’s Toxteth districts.
Yet when it came to football and music, both cities punched well above their respective demographic weights, making them special to millions around the globe, but also reinforcing and extending the rivalry.
On the pitch, enmities were not clear cut. Manchester City were the bigger Mancunian club until World War Two, while Everton were often the pre-eminent Merseyside force. Indeed, the rivalry between United and Liverpool was respectful until the 1960s with some Manchester United players even going to watch Liverpool when United didn’t have a game.
‘We’d stand on the Kop,’ recalls Pat Crerand, a former hard-tackling United midfielder turned pundit. ‘The Scousers would have a word with us, but it was good humoured.’ Bill Shankly used to call Crerand at home every Sunday morning for a friendly football chat. Shankly and the United manager Matt Busby, who both hailed from Lanarkshire mining stock in Scotland, were also close and Busby had played for Liverpool.
‘I always had great respect for Liverpool Football Club and Bill Shankly,’ adds Crerand (though that didn’t stop him, in his early-’70s role as United’s assistant manager, from snaring Lou Macari in the Anfield main stand just as he was about to sign for Liverpool). ‘When I go to Anfield now, I speak to long-standing Liverpool fans who can’t put up with what the rivalry has become, with the hooliganism and the nastiness between the fans. Liverpool and Manchester are both working-class cities that have produced two of the greatest football clubs in the world. People should be proud of that, but they’re not.’
United had the hegemony in the 1960s – twice league champions and the first English team to win the European Cup. Not since that decade has a player left United for Liverpool or vice-versa (Phil Chisnall was the last, in April 1964). Liverpool were far superior to United in the 1970s and ’80s, winning four European Cups and eleven league titles as United endured twenty-six title-free years, but United were usually the better supported club and matched Liverpool in head-to-head encounters. And even as Liverpool had the success, United enjoyed a reputation and allure which rankled Liverpool supporters who thought it undeserved.
By the 1980s, the rivalry had become vicious, with United’s Scouse manager Ron Atkinson describing a trip to Anfield as like going into Vietnam. Big Ron’s experience fighting the Viet Cong has not been fully substantiated, but he can be forgiven for exaggerating – he had just been tear gassed.
‘We got off the coach and all of a sudden something hit us and everyone’s eyes went,’ Atkinson recalls. ‘I thought it was fumes off new paint or something, but it was tear gas. In our dressing room before the game there were a lot of fans, Liverpool fans too, kids, all sorts, eyes streaming. Clayton Blackmore was so bad he wasn’t able to play. I was in an awful state. I’d run in and there’d been two blokes standing in front of the dressing room door and I couldn’t see who they were. I was blinded and I’d pushed one of them up against the wall. Afterwards, [assistant manager] Mick Brown said, “What you done to Johnny Sivebaek?” I said, “What are you on about?” It turned out that Sivebaek, who we’d signed the week before, didn’t speak much English and in his first game, against the European champions, he was gassed as he got off the coach and then got hurled against the wall by his new team manager. No wonder he didn’t perform that day!’
Liverpool fans frequently sang songs about the 1958 Munich air crash, but stopped for a time after the 1989 Hillsborough disaster. United fans barely sang about Hillsborough until a minority changed that in recent years. Yet for every United fan who stoops so low, you’ll find one who respects the continued boycott of The Sun on Merseyside and the continuing campaign for justice for the ninety-six who perished.
SIX CLASSIC GAMES
Liverpool 3 United 3
League, April 1988
First v Second, but Liverpool’s substantial lead made them clear title favourites. Reduced to ten men and trailing 3–1 with thirty minutes left, United were on the ropes until goals from Bryan Robson and Gordon Stra-chan levelled the scores. The latter celebrated by smoking an imaginary cigar in front of an outraged Kop.
For United fans, no matter how dangerous the trip to Anfield became, it remained one of the most eagerly-awaited of the season because it contained all the edge, passion, and vitriol that you’d expect from a long-standing cultural and social enmity between two teams whose cultural influence extends far beyond their city boundaries.
In the 1990s, Liverpool’s demise coincided with United’s ascendancy under Alex Ferguson. Asked to list his greatest achievement at United, Fergie once replied: ‘Knocking Liverpool off their fucking perch. And you can print that.’ That wasn’t quite how Scousers intended it to be when they unleashed their ‘Form is temporary, class is permanent’ banner in 1992 as United squandered a league title at Anfield.
In contrast to the hooligan-blighted ’70s and ’80s when Liverpool were on top, the Sky-led football boom allowed United to capitalise on their success and the Mancunians accelerated into a different financial league by regularly expanding Old Trafford; meanwhile Liverpool were hampered by Anfield’s limited capacity. United were so commercially successful that many fans objected to the 2005 Glazer takeover principally on the grounds that they were not needed, while Liverpool fans welcomed their new American owners in 2007 because they are.
Both clubs fill their grounds but Old Trafford has over 30,000 more seats than Anfield, allowing United to make more than £1.4 million per home match than Liverpool. Liverpool only have to look east for the justification for building a new stadium.
It’s three hours before kick-off at Anfield and I’m sitting in a pub full of Liverpool fans in Liverpool city centre. Among them is the novelist Kevin Sampson, author of seminal tomes like Away Days and Powder. Reading Powder and knowing that Sampson was a Liverpool fan, I interviewed him for the United We Stand fanzine in 1999.
I met him at Lime Street and it went well – it remains the most popular interview in the fanzine’s eighteen-year history, although we received three letters from readers appalled about ‘fraternising with the enemy’. Our conversation should have been over a lunchtime pint, but extended to an overnight stay
