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Manchester United and Leeds United may be resuming hostilities against the backdrop of the huge empty stands at Old Trafford this Sunday, but the game will still have the same lead as ever.
This utter animosity, deeply rooted in history, has been dormant for most of the 21st century, but is ready to erupt once more in a first Premier League match in 16 years.
Few football rivalries in this country are so poisonous both on and off the field, so often in the last 50 years or so that they stray beyond the limits and divide not only two cities on opposite sides of the Pennines, but also friends and families.
In many ways, it is a colossal shame that Covid-19 has prevented fans from attending Sunday’s game. Sir Alex Ferguson described the meetings with Leeds as “fantastic and energetic occasions” in “electric” atmospheres with a “tinge of hostility”.
But as the confrontations between Denis Law and Jack Charlton, Nobby Stiles and his brother-in-law Johnny Giles, and Roy Keane and Alf-Inge Haaland demonstrate, blood can boil on the field just as easily as it can outside.
Those looking for a long lineage in this rivalry speak of the Wars of the Roses between the rival Plantagenet houses of York and Lancaster for the English throne in the 15th century.
Even now, Leeds play in the white uniform that resembles the Yorkshire white rose and Man United play in red jerseys like the Lancashire red rose.
The Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries brought Manchester ‘Cottonopolis’ and the wool-producing powerhouse of Leeds, just 40 miles apart, in direct competition.
Travel between the two cities has become much faster and easier in the last century, yet those born on both sides actively seek to differentiate themselves from those on the opposite side of the Pennine divide in a never-ending argument for superiority. Either you are Lancashire or you are Yorkshire.
In football terms, it all started in 1906 when Leeds City, as it was known then, beat Manchester United 3-0 in the Second Division in front of 6,000 spectators on Bank Street, the forerunner of Old Trafford.
But there was no rivalry between the two clubs until the mid-1960s. In fact, when Don Revie was appointed manager of Leeds in 1961, one of his first acts was to phone Matt Busby and ask if the Man United manager might have an hour off to impart some managerial wisdom.
Busby invited the rookie manager to Old Trafford and Revie ended up spending the entire day there.
But within a few short years, Revie’s granite-resistant Leeds, featuring Jack Charlton, Norman Hunter, Billy Bremner and Giles, who crossed the Busby team Pennies for £ 33,000 in 1963, challenged Busby’s serial title winners. and the pioneers of the European Cup.
The role ignited in 1964 when newly promoted Leeds arrived at Old Trafford and beat leader Man United 1-0. In the tunnel beforehand, 5ft 3in terrier Bobby Collins, captain of Leeds, kicked George Best and proclaimed ‘that’s just for starters, Bestie’.
The equally tenacious Stiles took offense and slammed Collins against the perimeter fence at the first available opportunity.
Their meeting in the FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough the following March, with both teams chasing a League and Cup double, was equally volatile.
An agricultural tackling competition saw Jack Charlton and Denis Law throwing punches at each other, the Man United striker playing the final 20 minutes with his ripped jersey hanging from his shoulder.
The violent nature of the content, a goalless draw, was widely criticized by the press. The replay at Nottingham Forest’s City Ground saw trouble spill over to the terraces, something that would become a running theme when the clubs met. Some supporters ended up in the Trent River in the middle of the fighting.
Bremner won it with a header in the 89th minute and when Giles tried to comfort Stiles on the final whistle, his old friend and relative told him to ‘fuck off’.
Leeds lost the Cup final to Liverpool and were outscored for the league title by their Manchester rivals on goal average, that old-time divisor of teams tied on points.
Although Busby’s United would become the first English club to lift the European Cup in 1968, Revie’s Leeds would soon surpass them, winning the championship in 1969 and 1974 while enjoying their own European successes.
It took three games to split the teams in the 1970 FA Cup semi-final, with Bremner once again rising to the occasion for Leeds in a second repeat at Burnden Park in Bolton.
With the glory days of Best, Law and Bobby Charlton a fading memory, Man United was pumped 5-1 at Elland Road in 1972 and suffered the ignominy of relegation to the second division when Leeds won the title in 1974. From In fact, Leeds only lost three of their 25 meetings with their rivals in a 1970 race.
The FA Cup draw paired them into the semi-final stage once again in 1977, by which time Man United had returned to the top ranks.
The match schedule for the game in Hillsborough billed it as ‘The Battle of the Roses’ and it certainly was in the stands as the hooligans battled it out during a 2-1 win for a resurgent Man United.
By then Revie was gone and, as if to scrub the decline of his rivals, Joe Jordan and Gordon McQueen, two of Leeds’ best players, moved to Old Trafford in quick succession during 1978.
Particularly brave was McQueen’s comment: “Ask every player in the country which club they would like to join and 99 percent would say ‘Manchester United’. The other one percent are liars.
He received a scathing welcome on his first return to Elland Road, thus initiating a kind of theme that other ‘Judas’ Eric Cantona, Rio Ferdinand and Alan Smith would discover for years to come.
As Ferdinand reflected on his transfer in 2002: “There was a lot of bitterness from the Leeds fans when I left. I couldn’t have come back or I would have been lynched.
Tensions cooled when Leeds entered the Second Division during the 1980s, but it rose again, curiously enough, with the catalyst of Gordon Strachan’s move from Man United in 1989.
Leeds were champions before Ferguson got his hands on it, but Cantona’s shock sale for £ 1.2 million in 1992 proved fatal to the Yorkshire club’s chances of sustained success in that decade.
As the story goes, Leeds Managing Director Bill Fotherby called Man United president Martin Edwards to ask him about hiring Denis Irwin before the conversation turned to Cantona.
The mistake materialized when Manchester United won four of the first five Premier League-era championships at the beginning of a Fergie dynasty of successes.
The meetings of the two clubs still had a lot of venom. Keane damaged his cruciate ligaments in an affair with Haaland on Elland Road in 1997, when the Norwegian accused the Irishman of faking an injury while lying in agony on the ground.
Keane’s revenge came four years later, when he dug his cleats into Haaland’s knee during a Manchester derby at Old Trafford.
The off-court element of the rivalry became even more spiteful. A minority of Leeds fans had often referenced the Munich air disaster and made airplane gestures to goad their rivals, while some chanted ‘There’s Only One Don Revie’ during a minute of silence after Busby’s death. in 1994.
There had been resentment over the widespread affection for Busby that they believed Revie did not receive after his passing in 1989.
Any hope of a rapprochement in shared grief after the death of two Leeds supporters in Istanbul in 2000 was dashed when Man United fans displayed banners of ‘MUFC Istanbul Reds’ and ‘Galatasaray Reds’ at their next league match.
It was Gary Neville who once described Elland Road as “a monstrous place” and talked about how Ferguson’s team talks about “getting in there, getting a result and getting out as fast as we can.”
Aside from a brief period at the turn of the millennium in which Leeds appeared to be a contender for the title, Man United maintained supremacy and once Leeds suffered relegation in 2004, something quickly followed by Smith’s highly controversial move, the rivalry faded. again.
Mind you, Jermaine Beckford’s winner against Stretford End in a 2010 FA Cup meeting, when Leeds was in League One, served as a reminder of what was bubbling not far below the surface.
Now they are back on a level playing field and one of the most intense rivalries in the game can finally resume.
Source: m.allfootballapp.com
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