Excitement and dread ahead of derby D-day

A startling headline in a newspaper yesterday announced that a warrant had been issued for the arrest of Steven Pienaar, who scored Everton’s potentially season-shifting equaliser on Sunday. Harsh, but fair, I briefly thought, before realising it was for a speeding offence.

Of course, the arrest warrants should have been issued for United’s defence, and especially for poor Rafael, who repeatedly committed the grievous crime of wandering without intent in a built-up penalty area.

“I can laugh about it now but at the time it was terrible,” once warbled a fellow Stretfordian. I’m still not quite at the laughing stage. None of us are.

Out have come the abacuses again — but unlike a fortnight ago, it’s not for the pleasurable task of working out where we’re going to lift the title. This time it’s to plot out all the different ways we might yet be sunk, or so it seems if you listen to the defeatists. You’d think we were going into Monday’s showdown three points behind, not ahead.

Perhaps this is an understandable function of what we saw in the last two derbies: the unmentionable one last autumn, but also the cup tie at Wastelands when City’s 10 men gave us a shoeing for much of the game, and many Reds came away hugely concerned about our apparent fundamental inferiority as a team.

That Monday is the biggest derby ever is stating a commonplace. I was going to try and make the case for the relegation battles of 1962 and 1974, or the cup semi last year which had such a psychological impact in the city, but I won’t. The only one that comes close took place in the spring of 1968, when City won 3-1 at Old Trafford and set off on a run-in that took them to their last title.

Oldies will have had their memory further jogged by two of this year’s run-in fixtures: City will have to play Newcastle, whilst we face Sunderland. Those were the two fixtures on the last day of the 1968 season, when City sensationally won 4-3 at St James’ Park whilst we slumped 1-2 at home to the Mackems.

As one of my colleagues recalls with a shudder: “I never forgot the close-up on Match Of The Day that night of a shattered Bobby Charlton traipsing in abject misery from the pitch.”

We were champions then, too; sadly the parallels stop there, as at least the ’68 boys had a European Cup final to look forward to — the result of which was that poor City’s triumph was later all but obliterated in the public consciousness.

There’s no such fallback for us this time: it’s nirvana or the abyss.

Thus it is that the game has become something genuinely unique, in the sense that it can’t be compared to our past experience of European Cupfinals or so-called title-deciders. When you reach a Euro final, there is no real sense of existential anxiety; if you lose, you lose — you made the final, you’ve had a great trip and you will remain proud to have been there. And our modern-day title deciders have been against clubs whose success we could live with: we don’t like Chelsea or Arsenal — but neither are they the kind of rivals whose decider-day triumphs ruin day-to-day lives in the way that this one would. You can simply feel it, too: it is unique because I have rarely known a match whose prospect simultaneously fills me with so much excitement and dread. It’s like going on a date with Catherine the Great.

You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned the actual footballing minutiae here. M’eh. Monday, to my mind, is going to be all about the emotion of the moment, and who handles it the better. I’ll be taking the bottle of Jameson’s route...