“This town ain’t big enough for the both of us”

Or so Rio Ferdinand was saying the other day, after someone asked how he viewed the challenge of a Manchester City loaded with enough money to buy Old Trafford, paint it blue and erect a great flashing sign over it saying “Welcome to Abu Dhabi”.

Ferdinand’s message seemed to be that football, as played by Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United, would prevail. And thus the build-up began to a derby match tomorrow for which the spectators will begin to gather, appropriately enough, around high noon.

You might think that Manchester had never seen the like: a duel for local and national supremacy. But it happened 42 seasons ago. Sir Matt Busby had rebuilt United after the Munich air crash and they were champions for the second time in three years when City, revived by canny old Joe Mercer and dazzling young Malcolm Allison, left them runners-up in 1968. You might also imagine that it was the end of a parochial argument. But United chose that season to become England’s first champions of Europe, overcoming Benfica at Wembley — and the city just had to be big enough for the both of them.

Manchester was the capital of football then, just as it aspires to be now. There were George Best, Denis Law and Bobby Charlton, facing Francis Lee, Colin Bell and Mike Summerbee. Yet the surrounding landscape would be thought odd by anyone under middle age today, and not just because of the swaying crowds on ugly terraces and muddy pitches flooded by dim light. The game ran itself differently. More healthily, in that there was less of a class system. In one five-year period, the champions had been Wolverhampton Wanderers, Burnley, Tottenham Hotspur, Ipswich Town and Everton.

No one was scared of anyone else and it seems extraordinary now that in 1967-68, when City finished first and United second, each lost ten matches. Nor did success breed success, for there was no oligarchy created by Champions League qualification for the leading four clubs. City did get into the European Cup but, after Allison had trumpeted that “we will terrify Europe”, were swiftly knocked out by Fenerbahçe.

Football soon put you in your place. A year after being champions, City finished thirteenth. United fell from second to eleventh. Neither club strayed far from mid-table until 1974, when Law, having joined City, almost reluctantly back-heeled the goal forever associated with the day that Old Trafford was relegated.

Nothing like that could happen now. As long as Ferguson retains his powers, United will be contenders for English and European titles. As long as Sheikh Mansour keeps the pipeline open, City will have their say. And the arguments that raged in the pubs of Fallowfield and Wythenshawe will consume the world wide web. And are unlikely to be of much interest to the owners in their air-conditioned suites in Florida and the Gulf. Some of those who once bayed at Peter Swales — the City chairman with his plastered strands of unfeasibly black hair — and the Edwards family as their cars slid in from Cheshire may even feel tenderly nostalgic.

Success was not just a matter of using the most expensive agents. A rare chemistry came into it after City turned to Mercer in 1965. A fine player and champion for Everton and Arsenal before a shattered leg ended his career at 39 — even as the pain creased his face, he remembered to wave goodbye to the Highbury crowd from his stretcher — Joe insisted on help.

A breakdown in health had cost him his previous job, with Aston Villa. So he turned to Allison, a Ron Greenwood disciple regarded as the finest of all young coaches, a man handsome and extrovert enough, moreover, to deny Best a monopoly on Mancunian glamour.

Mercer and Allison made brilliant buys, paying only about £140,000 in total for Bell, with his skill and stamina, Summerbee, a winger whose way with full backs was to cast the first stud, and the explosive Lee. The football was a glorious gallop until Mercer handed over the reins in 1971. Allison’s ego ran amok. He kept trying to see what no one else could. He sought to persuade a mundane winger that he was the greatest sweeper since Beckenbauer: things like that. Such was the damage that Allison went and City were never the same again.

Some reflections on the period, though, are reassuring. After a League Cup semi-final towards the end of the Sixties, United defenders angrily accused a City player of diving to win a penalty. Nor was it an unusual charge for Francis Lee, but fortunately such practices have now been eradicated from the game and nothing like it could happen at Old Trafford tomorrow.