Steven Kelly: Football is the dividing line that cannot be crossed between Liverpool and Manchester
Merchandise and plenty of goading for sale prior to last January’s Premier League match between Liverpool and Manchester United at Anfield. People on the outside never knew just how unpleasant it got. Photo: Michael Regan/Getty
For my dad it was Everton. It was always Everton.
There was just something about those eight years in the Second Division, between 1954 and 1962, when he was in his twenties, which absolutely scarred him for life. In the portable TV age he would be banished to the bedroom while mum watched Dallas or some such rubbish, and you could hear him laughing at an Everton defeat upstairs. I mean, even I wasn’t that bitter. These were full, raucous yucks.
He told me years later that his life had been made an absolute misery by blue noses, even though their team was hardly in the ascendancy except by locality. When Bill Shankly came along and blew all that nonsense out of the water, my dad had his one and only religious confirmation, with room enough for just the one nemesis. He passed it on to me. Man, that shit at Kiev was funny. Full, raucous yucks.
Manchester United? Yeah, he couldn’t really stand them either. But being a grown man in the 1950s, I suppose he couldn’t help but admire what they’d done with ex-Liverpool captain Matt Busby at the helm. The tragedy at Munich was a national one. When I was small I once heard my dad rip somebody to shreds for the usual ‘58’ nonsense. “We cried that day,” he said. Whether he actually did or not I never asked him. He might just have been embroidering his point, but a genuine distaste for the merciless mockery of a plane crash and that senseless waste of all that talent was also part of my inheritance, at an age when what your dad says goes.
There was ambivalence, of course. We both watched a documentary on the disaster once, part of the anniversary ‘celebrations’ Granada TV often did, and one of the journalists that had also been killed got a mention. “That twat,” came the mutter from the other end of the couch. This was new. “They had the team to end all teams and we had nothing, but he never put the whip down once that bastard”. So this wasn’t a modern phenomenon, then. Those of us who at that time were tired of reading about what Bryan Robson had for breakfast, and needed a looking glass to find out who Liverpool had been drawn against in yet another European Cup quarter-final, weren’t the first to get tetchy.
This was also around the year of my first trip to Old Trafford. I’d been to Manchester lots of times before, to sell second-hand records on Oxford Road and shuffle cautiously through the concrete nightmare that was Hulme to a curiously-decorated art-house cinema before going home at night. It was dark, moody, the sort of place you knew Joy Division were born to make the soundtrack for, but nothing ever happened to me.
Both cities loved their music, loved their art (or “aaaarrrrrrrt” as we both seemed to call it), and yet football was the dividing line always. A jagged, glass-shard line that could not be crossed, or else.
The special train pulled into the cricket ground’s station and we all stood around in a dishevelled hoard, waiting to be frogmarched up to the ground. It was thrilling, once you knew no-one was actually daring to push through our large, truncheoned overcoat. In the ground there was the usual back and forth between the fans, with Munich at the fore and sharpened coins raining down from behind. You soon learned not to turn around.
There was also a new ditty now, “Shankly 81”, and the match passed off almost as an irrelevance. We won, luckily, but there was more danger in the overcrowded underpass at Warwick Road waiting to go home than on the walk back.
In 1983 I returned and heard just what it meant to the Mancs whenever they put one over on us. Arnie Muhren scored and it was like a bomb went off. Impressive, despite the pain of the scoreline. Kenny equalised four minutes later. The songs, and the atmosphere, continued to nosedive for years after that.
I struggled a bit with all of this. You knew full well that others found it as tacky as you did but stayed silent and let everyone else spew out their bile. How could you stop it except with violence of your own? People on the outside never knew just how unpleasant it got. One ‘indie’ magazine about LFC once showed its readers how to make the perfect paper aeroplane. This is true, I swear. It stood alongside a cartoon about the adventures of Kop Kat. People were oblivious. Like Manchester City’s inflatable bananas, they just thought paper aeroplanes were a cute addendum. Oh, you wacky football fans…
So it had always seemed a bit rotten. It meant trying to keep your distance from the sheer hatred of United despite their team doing virtually nothing while we were winning virtually everything in sight.
It almost came full circle — them like us and we like them; bemused and resentful.
Hillsborough had something to do with it, our own disaster and a brutal realisation of what we’d been doing to them before. United then started to win stuff too while we began to struggle. It was all going horribly, horribly wrong.
‘They’ could always have their own moments of course. “Where’s your famous Munich song?” was code for you-know-what, no-one ever really thought otherwise. I saw one lad dragged out by a steward once for making an ‘H’ sign with his hands. I suppose it’s not that impressive a feat for somebody with six fingers. (Oooo look, I’m getting just as bad as everyone else now). I’ll bet as he was being arrested outside he told them he meant Heysel, not Hillsborough, that tiresome cop-out which fools nobody but which they still cling to like a life-raft.
United won loads and it began to get nasty again. Munich songs returned, at Old Trafford anyway, along with a new tilt about Harold Shipman. A mass murderer of vulnerable pensioners in Cheshire? I mean, really? I was getting on a bit now anyway, and going to Man U games now felt like we needed that stuff Jodie Foster puts under her nose to blot out the corpse’s stench in Silence of the Lambs.
What the hell. It was usually just twice a year. In a way, as Kevin Sampson explained in his excellent Extra Time back in the ’90s, it was invigorating to find an event that cut through the post-Sky ‘Football’s Coming Home’ gentility and which actually mattered to people despite its physical menace and moral vacuity.
United were always winning stuff now, including a Treble which we tried to dismantle twice (in the league and the cup) and failed miserably. We once sat watching an utterly dismal home game against Leicester and there were delirious cheers for Juventus beating United in a Champions League semi-final, the loudest noise of the night. The three United goals after that passed in silence, and Leicester won – also in silence. This club had seen better days but it’s doubtful it’s seen many that were worse, purely in football terms obviously.
There were rare occasions when it all mattered on a football level as well as a tribal one.
Gerard Houllier got the better of them quite a few times in such a guarded, sucker-punch manner that it began to seem genuinely hilarious. It didn’t really matter, though. In fact, when you sat down and thought about it Liverpool never really got the better of them.
In an era of Scouse plenty, Liverpool couldn’t beat United at home for eight years. Eight! They of course had already scuppered our own ‘proper’ Treble way back in 1977, and also destroyed what would have been our first Double in 1979. We’d won a couple of League Cup finals, but even that competition started to seriously decline as a major achievement, so that almost didn’t count.
FA Cup finals? Forget it. League deciders? Well, we did sort of win one in 2009 that dragged us back into the race, but they still won the thing at the end to make it 18 titles each. Liverpool’s best-ever league performance and we came second. To them.
For all of my rationalised ‘too cool for school’ demeanour, there was no denying they were becoming incredibly irritating. The Reds still rose above petty rivalry by beating Blackburn for them in 1995 and got no thanks for it. By 2010 such niceties were done away with as Liverpool feebly collapsed at home to Chelsea. No favours that day; Steven Gerrard even made the gruesome mistake that put a Chelsea striker clean through on goal to make it 1-0. Remember that, because it becomes important later on.
For the last three league challenges Liverpool managed to muster in those not-so-halcyon days, they coincidentally managed to beat United home and away. A fat lot of good it did us. In the last one the big bad wolf had retired and they’d put Little Red Riding Hood in charge instead — on Fergie’s strict instructions, no less. Comedy gold. David Moyes was awful and, unsurprisingly, way out of his depth. Liverpool won at their place 3-0, with penalties and a red card. The away end was bumptious and triumphant. This was all coming to an end, finally.
No, it wasn’t. Gerrard made a gruesome mistake that put a Chelsea striker clean through on goal a month later and that was all she wrote. It didn’t even matter that it helped give the title to City.
United were now so contemptuously arrogant, so assured of their own neighbours’ lack of substance and consequence, the mere fact that the unelected leader of the Scouse gang had fucked it all up made it another United triumph over Liverpool.
Just as United’s pre-title collapse crowing had made them a national laughing stock in 1992, when even a calamitous dud like Mark Walters could still be a hero and bang the final nail in the coffin, Liverpool had fucked up in the final strait. Devon Loch job, as someone once said.
OK, so now they were beginning to annoy me a little. This was Evertonian behaviour they were indulging in. When City strolled out of Goodison with three points and barely a whimper from the Blues, with the Oasis record ‘The Masterplan’ blaring through the tannoy at half-time, that was only to be expected. A photo of grinning Howard Kendall — Everton’s greatest manager, snigger — emerged of him holding up a T-shirt with Tony Book and Mike Summerbee which read “It’s not the winning; it’s the taking part that counts”. Teams, date, venue, everything.
And so this was the kind of company United were now keeping after all those years of glory and one poor season. They were welcome to each other. Moyes couldn’t last obviously, we lost Luis Suarez to Barcelona and Daniel Sturridge got nobbled by The Hodge again. The times they weren’t a-changing after all.
Liverpool fans were relatively nonchalant. Better results eventually followed and now both clubs were vying for the fabled Champions League spot.
This was the time to revive the old Borges quote about the Falklands War: two bald men fighting over a comb. Still, it had the semblance of a fight for something vaguely significant and it was Liverpool verses Manchester United. We had a good record at home against them as well, so what could possibly go wrong?
As it turned out, everything. United go in front, and there’s a muffled mutiny on the Kop. They’ve come into our place, our home, doing exactly as they please. Taking the piss, actually. This is not on. Time for some loud bellowing, with coherent words merely optional. There are a few tackles flying in now and United aren’t backing down. The referee, Martin Atkinson, books Joe Allen, and then talks to Fellaini. And talks. And talks. Jesus, get his phone number and have done with it.
The away end is in its element and any idea of blotting them out has evaporated. It’s time for the greatest hits: “The Sun was right, you’re murderers”. Christ. Even Kelvin bastard Mackenzie isn’t clinging to that one any more.
It’s pure incitement. “Murderers” and “Justice for the 39”, it’s all seeping out now. Anfield hasn’t indulged in this sort of crap since the ’80s, and what’s more the Mancs know it and they just get worse and worse.
They never ever get called on this shit. Mention it to anyone and they’ve got one for that too. “Always the victim”. You get more and more pissed off, wriggling in a web they’ve created and every ‘neutral’ bootlicker panders to them. Back and forth it goes, proving Darwin wrong with every utterance.
All that’s left to do now is win the game, turn it around, ram it right back down their throats — but Adam Lallana misses a sitter. He’s also launched into the air by Phil Jones and this challenge doesn’t even merit the lecture. This is starting to stink a bit now, but it’s not as if we deserved any better the way we’re playing.
Half-time and a chance for Brendan Rodgers to work some of that 180-page dossier magic of his. There’s another saddening event on the pitch as the great Pele is in town. Not because it’s Anfield, not even because it’s Liverpool v United. He’s here to flog butties for some corporate monstrosity. The interview on the pitch is tedious, embarrassing and interminable. There are numerous comments on the Kop about a legend’s indignity, happening as it does at the same time Raheem Sterling is holding out for over £150,000-a-week. I found out later that Pele was wearing a yellow and green tie, Subway’s colours.
Second-half starts and this looks like something. Gerrard is ready to come on and the first thing he does is an excellent 40-yard pass. The second thing he does is go crunching into a tackle. The third thing he does is stand on Ander Herrera. The fourth is to walk forlornly off the pitch. It’s a red card.
The Kop is now at boiling point. In days of old it would have stayed that way but everyone has a smartphone now.
Texts from friends, vines on Twitter, it all happens in the blink of an eye. It was blatant. He had to go. The atmosphere is suitably solemn again. He walked in and walked out again like Grandpa Simpson. More Manc hilarity ensues as Liverpool’s talisman continues the worst football farewell of all time.
Now there’s shock and not a little dread. United had already made 11 v 11 look easy, what was the rest of this going to be like? They get a second — not a bad goal actually — and we’re starting to watch this through our fingers while Atkinson is taking some serious piss now. Every United dive is a foul while Jones just assassinates Jordan Henderson. There’s no other word for it. There’s also no apology and he doesn’t even look back. He knows full well what colour the card will be. Yellow, like the streak down the referee’s back. It’s bordering on comical now.
Sturridge gets one goal back but it never really looks like another one will come. We were relying on Mario Balotelli, that’s how desperate it gets.
Simon Mignolet saves a Wayne Rooney penalty, Martin Skrtel stands on David De Gea, the referee blows for time and the Mancs are making an almighty meal of the last incident. They can’t even win with a slither of grace.
So that’s that then. It’s now time to practise all those ‘I wasn’t bothered about the Champions League, it’s just a gravy train and we’re shit in it anyway’ diatribes that aren’t going to fool anybody. Even for Liverpool v United, this is a real red-letter day for them. The spoils, the laughs and the eventual ‘triumph’ at the end of the season, with one, probably two bans for us. They even got to sing their tiresome venom safe in the knowledge that no one will ever corner them on it. How can this keep on happening?
You can paraphrase Doctor Johnson here and say that when a man is tired of Liverpool versus Manchester United, he is tired of life. Well, book my flight to Switzerland and get a room at Dignitas ready. There’s a United fan that e-mails me sometimes and he nearly always calls me “comrade”. He knows what he can do with that today. The Hillsborough shite they come out with is the worst kind of class treachery and they’re deluded if they think it’s in any way warranted.
Some Reds will read that and just say ‘For God’s sake man, stop your bloody whimpering and just hit them back harder’. At one point in the afternoon I actually wished some of the little rats who hang around Anfield’s street corners, one of whom had given me grief (an accent test, most likely), really did manage to make his way through the police cordon and catch one of them with a knockout blow. Chances are they just stood on the tips of their toes, bounced around for a couple of minutes and eschewed the usual tasteless jibes about lethally-injected pensioners. That’ll learn ‘em.
When I did a fanzine years ago I often got called Victor Meldrew because I was a miserable arl that got annoyed with anything and everything as it honestly felt like the world was leaving me behind. Even when things were at their finest for us we could never really get the better of United. Where’s the fairness in that?
So yeah, OK, they probably do bother me a little.
- This is an abridged extract from the book We’re Everywhere, Us: Liverpool’s 2014/15 Season Told Through the Stories of Fans and Foe, published by Pitch Publishing in 2015. Available on Amazon.
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