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 as Sampson introduced me as a curiosity figure to assorted Liverpool characters who claimed they’d never met a Mancunian United fan before.
Some didn’t want to socialise; they didn’t want to like what they had spent a lifetime loathing. They were content with the status quo that Liverpool and United despised each other and wouldn’t have it any other way: happy to reinforce stereotypes, exaggerate prejudices, and ignore the evidence that the two clubs are almost too alike to admit it. United fans were the same, perpetuating the clichés of Scousers as employment-shy thieves and passing over the statistic that you are almost twice as likely to get your house burgled in Manchester (which has burglary rates three times the national average) than Liverpool.
It’s the same in the pub today but there are signs of grudging respect.
‘Is there anything you respect about Manchester United?’ I ask a table of hardcore Liverpool fans.
SIX CLASSIC GAMES
Liverpool 3 United 3
League, January 1994
After winning the league for the first time in twenty-six years, United went to Anfield and were 3–0 up in twenty-four minutes. But Liverpool refused to be humbled and Nigel Clough pulled two goals back before half-time. United searched for another goal, but Neil Ruddock equalised with eleven minutes left. A classic.
‘Paul Scholes’, comes one reply.
‘Ryan Giggs’, another.
‘I don’t like Gary Neville, but I respect the way he signs contract after contract at United. We’d love a player who celebrated a goal so passionately against his main rivals.’
‘Why are United fans obsessed with Liverpool?’ asks another. ‘All your songs are about Liverpool. Ours are too, but we support Liverpool.’
One thing we do all agree on is a decline in the atmosphere inside both grounds. Sampson is now behind a campaign to ‘Reclaim the Kop’. In October 2006, he wrote an impassioned plea on a Liverpool website regarding his club’s support. It came after Liverpool had played Bordeaux, when sections of the Anfield crowd taunted 3,000 Frenchmen with chants of ‘Who are ya?’, ‘Eas-eh’ and ‘You’re not singing anymore’.
‘Seasoned heads were shook,’ reads the website. ‘It was embarrassing. These fans had welcomed travelling Reds for our away game, and here, at Anfield, we were ridiculing them. This is NOT the Liverpool Way. We led from the front. We never followed. Be it pop music, terrace chanting, fashions; we were pioneers in the British game. The “Reclaim the Kop” aims are to promote The Kop’s traditional values, its behaviour, and its songs. It aims to encourage fair play and respect towards the opposition; to promote The Kop’s traditional songs and chants; to encourage wit and creativity; and it aims