'If football doesn't move us to care or scream or hate then why bother?'
As the old rivalry fires up again on Sunday, we asked Nooruddean Choudry, better known as Twitter's Bearded Genius, what it means to the fans
http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/news/fans-view-liverpool-vs-man-2238026He runs half the length of the pitch before letting rip with a screamer just outside the area. It flashes past the keeper into the net and the away stand erupts.
Cameramen are on strike so there's no television audience. The goal remains unseen for a generation, but for those who witness it at the game. It is spoken about for years afterwards in almost mythical terms.
April 4, 1988: United are losing 3-1 away from home. They're down to ten men following a sending off and are being overrun in midfield. Norman Whiteside enters the fray and within seconds has planted a firm eight-studded hello onto the left shin of the opposition hard man. United mount a stirring comeback with Robson and Strachan providing the goals. Yet it's Big Norm's grand entrance and subsequent bossing of the game that endures in Mancunian folklore.
Neither of those instances or matches are of particular note or recollection to the outside world, but to Mancs and Scousers they resonate to this day. Not only because one was a stunning strike and the other a heroic comeback, but due to the fact they came against the enemy.
There's a hatred that fuels the joy and makes each small victory delicious. It's a mutual contempt that's as old as dinosaur sex (or at least the Manchester Ship Canal) and it simmers and boils within everyone complicit in a quarrel that has dominated the North for generations.
Not everyone would have it this way. Hypocrisy reigns in the haughty words of commentators who wish to sanitise our game and carve from it any element of tribalism. They’ll blabber on about the ‘Olympic spirit’ and what football supporters can learn from montage friendly Team GB-ers.
Yet they’ll happily scribe a paper forest on the theatre of El Classico or the ferocious nature of foreign derbies from Buenos Aires to Belgrade. Such passions abroad titillate their hipster sensibilities, yet they fear a local rage they can neither fathom nor control.
In our ridiculously over hyped HD era where every Sunday is super and each game somehow unmissable and season-defining, Manchester United versus Liverpool is real. It requires no forced narrative or manufactured grudge to sell subscriptions or improve circulation.
It’s pulsating anger and joy that courses through the veins of each man and woman born into it. Don’t lose. Don’t make Monday hell. Non-believers pray till their hands don’t close and even the most temperate lose their rag.
Of course, as with anything felt so raw and true, things can get out of hand and bleed into unpleasantness. Ghosts and tragedies are sometimes evoked in a way they shouldn't be. It’s unnecessary and a lid needs to be kept on such behaviour.
Football is never a matter of life and death, not that I for one second believe Shankly was being completely literal in his enigmatic statement. It is however vital to the existence of many and mustn't be distilled or sterilised into a retail ready commodity. Something to flog at the megastore.
Is all that we've become just nothing but hats and bags? An artificial atmosphere of half-half scarves and plastic flags? You can keep your mosaics. The hate is good, and it’s healthy. It’s based on something more than revenue generation or marketing speak.
If football doesn't move us to care or scream or hate then why bother? Whatever the outcome of Sunday’s game both sets of supporters will have visited the extremes of sporting emotion. In the afterglow of rapture they’ll have known love and hate. And the latter is just as vital as the former.
There is of course a begrudging subtext of respect. We hate you because you matter. We revel in your misery and spit on your name because you've earned our contempt. For a shared history and glorious past that fortunes cannot acquire.
But the resentment and ill feeling between Manc and Scouse must always be there. Give me a century of sleep before we give in to chummy indifference and hollow Soccer AM style banter.
Lovejoy? Nah, viva hate.
