Sir Alex Ferguson didn’t lose to Manchester City often but on the occasion of his most famous defeat by the club across town, he found the perfect way to sum it all up.
Standing in Maine Road’s cramped press room after a 5-1 thrashing on September 23, 1989, Ferguson said: ‘Trying to control that game was like trying to climb a glass mountain.’
All these years on, as the two Manchester clubs prepare to face each other in a second successive FA Cup final, the fifth full-time manager since Ferguson stepped away from the furnace 11 years ago knows the feeling well.
Erik ten Hag prepares for what may be his final match in charge of United having faced City in five games in his two years and lost four of them, conceding 15 goals. His team are priced at an astonishing 7-1 to win inside 90 minutes. A reminder is necessary here that there are only two horses in this race.
This is now the state of things in Manchester football. It’s not new. The cumulative Premier League points difference since Ferguson lifted his final, valedictory title in 2013 stands at 198 and that it’s in City’s favour hardly needs saying. United have never bettered City in that time. This season the gap was 31 points, the third time it has breached the 30-point mark.
Man City will be looking to inflict further misery on rivals Man United in Saturday’s FA Cup final
![Pep Guardiola and his side picked up their fourth consecutive Premier League title this season](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/05/24/22/85317133-13457571-image-a-20_1716586036532.jpg)
Pep Guardiola and his side picked up their fourth consecutive Premier League title this season
![Sir Alex Ferguson once claimed that United would never be underdogs to rivals City](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/05/24/20/85312819-0-image-m-6_1716578333823.jpg)
Sir Alex Ferguson once claimed that United would never be underdogs to rivals City
For United, the depth of the embarrassment is immeasurable, the length of the road back almost incalculable. Ferguson once said that United would never be underdogs to City in his lifetime. The truth is that, from a footballing point of view, their neighbours have wiped them from the map.
![](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/05/24/21/85312357-13457571-image-a-33_1716582595525.jpg)
And for those who feel City and their supporters may be growing bored or complacent of their domination of Manchester and indeed of English football, historical context is required.
For so many long and humbling years, it was the other way round and if those younger City supporters who have known only success in their lifetime don’t remember it, then you can bet they are living in households with parents and older siblings who do.
That day back in 1989 is still instructive in its own way. Paul Lake, the young City midfielder whose career was so horribly curtailed by a knee injury, tells a story of sitting in his car at traffic lights en route to the game and looking over at a father and son, both dressed in City colours.
‘This fella nudges his lad and does something that will stay with me for ever,’ Lake recalls. ‘Pressing his palms together as if in prayer, he looks at me beseechingly and simply mouths, “Please, please”.’
City’s big win remains a stand-out memory for so many of that age. The truth is, though, that it didn’t change anything.
City, short of money, real quality and any kind of direction, continued to bumble around the mid-regions of the top division and indeed lower while Ferguson went on to build a United team so successful his club’s supporters installed a banner on the top tier of the Stretford End noting how many years it had been since their local rivals had last won silverware. Each year it ticked over another notch.
‘I feel slightly embarrassed about the hype and frenzy surrounding that 5-1,’ writes former City winger David White in his book Shades of Blue.
![United enjoyed much success under Ferguson but now it is City who are dominant](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/05/24/20/85313893-13457571-image-a-24_1716580177781.jpg)
United enjoyed much success under Ferguson but now it is City who are dominant
![Sir Jim Ratcliffe's investment offers encouragement that matters could improve for United](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/05/24/20/85314123-13457571-image-a-25_1716580319057.jpg)
Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s investment offers encouragement that matters could improve for United
‘It was one victory in an era when they were far superior. Never once did I go to Old Trafford thinking we would compete at their level.
![](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/05/24/20/85312375-13457571-image-a-28_1716580402416.jpg)
‘That win was a false dawn. There was no golden era, no dramatic revival. Ferguson’s superstars dominated English football and our trophy cabinet gathered dust.’
While United went head to head with Liverpool and then Arsenal and Chelsea in the Premier League era, City felt patronised and Ferguson was rarely shy. When they moved from Maine Road to the City of Manchester Stadium in 2003 — now the Etihad Stadium — Ferguson was confident enough to publicly call it the ‘Temple of Doom’. When his team actually suffered a defeat there in March 2004, he was irritated enough to take a chunk out of the away dressing room wall.
At City the sense of inferiority was palpable and deep set. Their infamous former chairman Peter Swales — who ran the club for two decades from 1973 onwards — loved City so much he painted his walls sky blue. But he hated United just as deeply.
![](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/05/24/20/85312367-13457571-image-a-27_1716580377270.jpg)
‘My life was devoted to doing them,’ Swales told City historian Gary James shortly before his death in 1996.
‘I wanted to see City’s name everywhere, in all the newspapers. Nobody will ever catch them now and that was the one thing I tried to do. We came closer than anyone in the 1970s and we were in the same bloody city.’
As detailed in Tim Rich’s lovely book Caught Beneath the Landslide there were other City board members similarly obsessed by everything United were and their own club were not. One director, the late Ian Niven, wouldn’t even refer to United by name. He always called them Stretford Rangers.
And if all this feels a little historical and ‘so what’ right now, then it isn’t — simply because City and so much of their fanbase carried that feeling of being Manchester’s second club around with them for so long.
United may have looked west to Liverpool and even east to Leeds for their real rivalries but City never did. The only one that ever mattered to them was sitting there on all that land near White City and annually parading their latest trophy from a bus up and down Deansgate.
![](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/05/24/20/85312373-13457571-image-a-29_1716580427223.jpg)
These days, United wear their 20 league titles and three European Cups as proudly as ever. Their heritage remains fundamentally important to them and, if truth be told, the weight that continues to carry in the media and beyond rankles with some people inside City’s shiny blue walls a little. When it comes to neighbourly disputes, petty grievances are clung to over time.
With the influence of minority shareholder Sir Jim Ratcliffe and his Ineos group starting to be felt at Old Trafford, there is flickering hope that United’s floundering vessel may soon begin to turn round. At Wembley on Saturday they will not be without a chance. City laboured a little against them in winning this game 2-1 last season while Ten Hag has some players back, most notably the much-missed Argentinian central defender Lisandro Martinez.
![Lisandro Martinez's (left) recent return to action could prove to be of great benefit to United](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/05/24/22/85317207-13457571-image-a-21_1716586122892.jpg)
Lisandro Martinez’s (left) recent return to action could prove to be of great benefit to United
United’s Cup run has been haphazard, though. Their quarter-final and semi-final wins over Liverpool and Coventry from the Championship were from the drawer labelled ‘kamikaze’.
That’s how City used to do things, of course. For years it was hard to take your eyes off them, if often for the wrong reasons. Now it’s the Abu Dhabi-fuelled superclub that rolls forward with all the predictably monotonous menace once a calling card of Ferguson and his great United teams.
The great Laird of Old Trafford will be in his seat at Wembley on Saturday watching Ten Hag and his players trying to climb that mountain made of glass. If City perform, they win. That’s how lopsided this great northern argument has become.
Bored of it? Come off it. When it comes to the foot City have pressed hard on United’s throats, it’s not even a given that the novelty has worn off.
Source From: Premier League News, Fixtures and Results | Mail Online
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