Manchester Divided

The Australian left-back eyes like squashed raisins, a hairline that went south some time ago and a nose that could slice open a grapefruit was, at the time, engaged in the act of locking horns with Dwight Yorke, that well-known rabble-rouser, in a dispute over a throw-in (yes, a throw-in).
Acquainted as I was with the details of his horrific disciplinary record, I struck a one-pint bet with my mate that Tiatto would be sent off in the course of the proceedings. It was an audacious gambit which almost paid dividends, but more about that later.
When Beckham scored in the second minute, the overall mood in the pub was something like well, we can all go home now . The rest of the match didn t really pan out like that, of course, but we could be forgiven for thinking along such lines.
City s rotten form in the recent history of this fixture well, this fixture actually has no recent history to speak of, given where City have spent the past few seasons, but you know what I mean made the result a virtual fait accompli.
Even in the dismal final days of Ron Atkinson s reign, and the similarly painful first three years of Fergie s regime, United could always be relied upon to administer a good fisting to their local rivals twice yearly (except for the 5-1 game in 1989, but enough about that).
Given that United now have the best side in their history (c mon, admit it), City s chances of ekeing out a result were slim and Slim had just left town.
The football itself was as unsightly as one would expect. With the ball being leathered around the pitch like a punchbag, up hill and down dale, the whole spectacle was reminiscent of one of those helter-skelter Old Firm games from the early 1990s, when the only reasonably fluid football on show would come from the feet of either Paul McStay or Brian Laudrup.
Some aspects of United s play actually looked as bad as their worst performance of the season so far, the debacle away to PSV Eindhoven; it was just that City were too crap to punish their mistakes.
With one goal in their past four games, and that from a defender (Spencer Prior, who was excellent against United), it doesn t take a FIFA technical study group to work out City s problem. On Saturday they didn t look like scoring even when they looked like scoring, an achilles heel which may soon throw Joe Royle s decision to dispense with the services of George Weah into still sharper relief.
The foul quality of the play should have actually suited City, to whom it is not patronising to suggest that their best chance of getting a result lay in dragging United down to their level.
Accordingly, Joe Royle cut the cloth to suit the measure, leaving the reasonably cultured Ian Bishop on the bench, and dropping the skilled Scottish defender Paul Ritchie entirely.
You may recall that during Royle s days in charge of Everton, he rather crassly christened his team The Dogs Of War , and encouraged them to play in like manner, to compensate for the fact that very few of them were any good at football.
His attempts to get a similar kind of thing going at Maine Road have fallen upon fallow ground, as four successive league defeats would now indicate. The Premiership s skill levels have risen noticeably even in the five short years since Royle s Goodison Park heyday, with the result that this kind of street-fighting-men approach doesn t really hack it in the real world any more.
Perversely enough, though, it seemed to work for United on the day. Steve McClaren pulled something of a masterstroke by filling his team selection with as many local lads as he could; the result was the sight of the Nevilles, Scholes, the perennially underrated Nicky Butt and man-of-the-match Wes Brown refusing to be out-muscled by the likes of Alf Inge Haaland, the peevish Paul Dickov and our friend Tiatto.
Late in the match, there should have been a certain sending-off, when the Antipodean clogger nearly emasculated Phil Neville with a challenge so late it almost took place in the return match at Old Trafford next April. The idiot referee chickened out of his responsibilities, however, depriving me of a pint in the process.
As I contemplated the loss of my free beer, the famous phrase from Hobbes Leviathan rose unbidden to the surface of my mind.
Nasty, brutish and short just about sums it up nicely. And his left peg ain t too hot either.