IT IS A TALE OF TWO CITIES, OF SOCIO-economic competition and clashes of culture, but these days, off the pitch at least, the rivalry between Liverpool and Manchester United knows no boundaries. No insult is too low, no taboo left unbroken. It is hate, pure and simple, and if anyone thinks it stems from Gary Neville’s fist-pumping, badge-kissing celebrations at Old Trafford last month, they are missing the point entirely.

Where to start in chronicling the latest descent of this rivalry towards the gutter and the kind of hostility that exists in cities such as Glasgow, Istanbul or Rio de Janeiro? Much has been made of the distasteful jibes about Alan Smith’s injury (“John Arne Riise, I wanna know how you broke his leg”) and those directed at Neville, but what of the chants about the Heysel and Hillsborough tragedies, the outstretched arms that make light of the Munich air disaster and the songs about Harold Shipman, George Best, Michael Shields and anyone else whose fate can be used as a means to score points in the ultimate game of onedownmanship?

This was a low and there have been plenty of them in this fixture down the years. In 1986, United’s players stepped off the team bus at Anfield and were greeted with what was thought to be an ammonia spray, with several young Liverpool supporters caught in the line of fire. That prompted discussions at boardroom level and, when United returned to Anfield the next season, this time under the management of Alex Ferguson, their players kicked signed footballs into the Kop beforehand as a goodwill gesture. Within seconds, the balls were back on the pitch, having seemingly been stabbed. These days any self-respecting Scouser would have put them straight onto eBay.

Objects were thrown onto the pitch on Saturday — a couple of coins at Steven Gerrard as he went to take a corner, the same, plus a hamburger, at Neville as he took a throw-in. That means the FA are likely to hear from Merseyside Police in the coming days, but more worrying, in one sense, were some of the atrocious chants coming from the stands. Sticks and stones? Names and insults can hurt more, particularly when designed with the malicious intent of rubbing salt in the wounds left by the deaths of 96 Liverpool fans at Hillsborough in 1989.

Some United fans take a perverse satisfaction in the fact that it took that tragedy to silence Liverpudlian taunts about what happened in Munich 31 years earlier. “Where’s your famous Munich song?” the United supporters would chant, knowing that it too had died on the terraces at Hillsborough, but uneasy occupation of the moral high ground was not enough.

In more recent years they have sung “if it wasn’t for the Scousers, we could stand”, but as Saturday’s game slipped away from them, they plumbed new depths, accusing their Liverpool counterparts of “killing your own fans” on that fateful day. It was a stomach-churning moment, a line that, however horrifying in print, sounded far worse when seized upon by a thousand people in the away end.

How much lower can it go? One dreads to think. These are supporters who can be humorous, warm and gracious — as shown by the ovation afforded to Smith by the majority of the home crowd once the moronic chants had died down — yet they bring out the worst in each other even though the atmosphere on the pitch is largely cordial. The FA may feel otherwise, but Neville’s behaviour four weeks ago is a symptom of that enmity, not a cause.

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