English FA Cup Fifth round: Daniel Taylor gives background to why Manchester United's Gary Neville can't stand Liverpool, Liverpool people, or anything to do with them.
Nantes-Atlantique airport, February 2002. Manchester United's players are queuing by passport control after their Champions League tie at the Stade de la Beaujoire and someone has heard Steven Gerrard has been injured, quite possibly seriously.
There is little sympathy about the plight of a Liverpool footballer. Someone queries whether it might be a broken neck.
"Shame it wasn't Michael Owen," someone else pipes up.
It is not a story that will appeal to believers of old-fashioned sportsmanship but, equally, it should not surprise any students of Mancunian-Liverpudlian sporting enmity given the current captain of Manchester United, Gary Neville, once publicly declared: "I can't stand Liverpool, I can't stand Liverpool people, I can't stand anything to do with them." He is so flagrantly anti-Liverpool his father, Neville Neville, interrupted one of his rants a few years ago to switch off the interviewer's tape-recorder, fearful his son was talking himself into trouble. Neville jnr is said to have responded: "But I do hate them, Dad."
At Anfield today, his 31st birthday, he will discover how badly his Liverpool-baiting has gone down when United arrive on enemy territory for an FA Cup fifth-round tie dripping with bad feeling. Alex Ferguson was moved yesterday to ask whether his right back would be "eaten alive". Ferguson predicted the invective against his number two would be "incessant" and he is unlikely to be proved wrong given that contributors to Liverpool's Through the Wind and Rain fanzine are threatening a "lynching" while urging Neville-haters to "stock up on tar and feathers".
Anyone, however, who believes the abuse will crack Neville does not know or understand the man. A United fanatic since the age of four, he has made it his business to let the wider world know of his Liverpool-loathing. Neville has also received threatening letters but remains unrepentant, regardless of the trouble he has brought upon himself. When United lost to Liverpool in the Worthington (League) Cup final in 2003 he returned home to find dozens of bottles of Worthington blocking his drive. Far more sinister was the night a gang of Liverpool fans tried to overturn his car after spotting him, stuck in match traffic in Salford Quays, a mile from Old Trafford.
Badly shaken, Neville decided after that not to go out of his way to make provocative comments about Liverpool. He has even tried to make conciliatory noises, claiming to be embarrassed by the attention his remarks had attracted. Yet, frequently, he reverts to type. Four weeks ago he went too far, sprinting 60 yards to the visiting enclosure at Old Trafford, pumping his fists and gyrating his hips in some kind of Mancunian haka. The repercussions will begin in the bear-pit of Anfield today.
On Tuesday he will turn to tackling the English Football Association's solicitors at a disciplinary hearing in London for his "excessive celebrations". Neville denies the charge of improper conduct and has instructed Old Trafford's lawyer Maurice Watkins to remain in Manchester because he wants to represent himself. "Do they want a game of robots?" he has complained.
To trace the history of this malevolence it is necessary to go back to Neville's youthful days on the Stretford End, where hating Liverpool was mandatory. His lesson from the terraces extended to playground battles at Elton High School in Bury, where he remembers, with disgust, that the reds of Liverpool habitually outnumbered those of United. Neville would ask his classmates why they supported a team from Merseyside when they lived closer to Manchester. They responded by taunting him about the amount of silverware hoarded in the Anfield trophy room. "When I was growing up there was certainly a large amount of jealousy involved," Neville once confessed. "The truth is, I envied them for all the success their team was having."
The resentment festered quietly at first.
"I coached Gary for many years and I was never aware of how strongly he felt," Eric Harrison, his youth team coach, said this week. "We played Liverpool plenty of times at junior level and Gary was no more hyped up than anyone else."
Neville unleashed his childhood frustrations in an interview with a United fanzine. "I said words to the effect that I can't stand Liverpool and everything to do with them," he recalled a few years later. His diatribe was lifted by a national newspaper, bringing about the song "Gary Neville is a Red, he hates scousers".
His team-mates now refuse, as a standing joke, to sit next to him on the coach going to Anfield for fear of a brick flying through the window. "You get the feeling the other players all get on but you can imagine Neville not even wanting to sit on the same bus as a Liverpool player, let alone be civil," one Liverpool fan wrote on the You'll Never Walk Alone website this week. "Maybe it's something to do with him being born in Bury," someone else suggested. "He isn't really a proper Mancunian, so he thinks he has to try harder."
What largely goes unreported is the song Liverpool fans have penned in Neville's honour, a particularly obscene verse to the tune of "Gary Neville is a Red" but with the lyrics changed in a way that any decent person must hope his mother, Jill, is not aware of. Given he is subjected to thousands of Liverpudlians singing it every time they play, it is no wonder Neville might want to rub a few noses in it when United win.
Guardian Service
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