Manchester City v Manchester United

• Hit F5 for updates or select our auto-refresh button below • Check the rest of today’s action on our live scoreboard • Email your thoughts to scott.murray@guardian.co.uk 8 min: Balotelli, in the centre circle, heads the ball wide right to Toure, who cuts inside and powers down the inside-right channel, before rolling a well-weighted pass down the middle for Balotelli (who had kept going) to run onto. Van der Sar is wise to their game, though, and out of his box early to clear. Lovely play all round, that. 6 min: Now Kolarov is very late on Valencia. If this was the 76th minute, that’d have been a booking. As it is, Mike Dean keeps his card in his pocket. 5 min: “They say form goes out the window in a local derby,” begins wise old Gary Naylor, “but I’ve a sneaking feeling that Paul Scholes will pick up a yellow card.” And sure enough, he’s late on De Jong. The referee chooses to wave play on. 3 min: Now City take a while to knock it around. Everyone’s just settling their nerves at the moment. Speaking of which, the ITV feed went down for a few seconds there. Somewhere, the hapless goon who pulled the plug on Steven Gerrard’s goal at the World Cup, and the dyspraxic lead-unplugging eejit who wiped out Dan Gosling’s FA Cup winner for Everton against Liverpool, were breathing a sigh of relief, no longer the company pariahs. Much like how Graeme Souness felt when Roy Hodgson took over at Liverpool, I guess. But the feed comes back up quite quickly, and we move on. You’ve missed nothing. And we’re off! United set the ball rolling, kicking towards the… er… the Hangar Lane Roundabout End? Anyway, they’re kicking that way. The Treble-winning wannabes hog the ball at the back for a while, stroking it around so as many of their men get a feel of it early on. The City fans boo and holler. What an atmosphere! “The referee’s a scouser!” splutters Jonny Mac, one bolus of phlegm flying just past Wirral whistleman Mike Dean’s lugs. “Well, close enough. Should be a grand afternoon for the neutral.” Let’s hope so. whatever happens. There is one hell of an atmosphere at Wembley. As you’d expect. The teams walk out at David Sole pace to a mighty roar. City have some natty 1981-style tracksuit tops on. I wonder what the thinking is there. “The train service is probably less reliable than it was in the 1800s,” notes Lizz Poulter, in a futile attempt at getting ITV News out of my bad books. ITV News has just run a lengthy pre-match report showing fans of both clubs getting off the train from Manchester at London Euston. They’ve sent cameras down to catch this historic event for posterity. FOR GOD’S SAKE. Given this is 2011, and the west-coast railway line has been running since the mid 1800s, what exactly do they expect people to do upon disembarking? Run out of the concourse in wide-eyed wonder like Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly in On the Town ? All together now: “The London Borough of Brent, it’s a helluva town…” Referee: Mike Dean (Wirral) Manchester United (4-3-2-1): Van der Sar, O’Shea, Ferdinand, Vidic, Evra, Valencia, Scholes, Carrick, Park, Nani, Berbatov. Subs: Kuszczak, Owen, Anderson, Smalling, Hernandez, Fabio Da Silva, Gibson. Manchester City (7-2-1): Hart, Zabaleta, Kompany, Lescott, Kolarov, Silva, De Jong, Barry, Toure Yaya, Adam Johnson, and the one-man nuclear meltdown that is Mario Balotelli. Subs: Taylor, Boyata, Vieira, Milner, Wright-Phillips, Dzeko, Jo. Kick off: 5.15pm. One good omen for City (sort of): They won the last (and indeed the first) FA Cup semi between these two teams. The 1926 semi at Bramall Lane ended 3-0 to City. Of course, it goes without saying that they went on to lose the final and get themselves relegated. You wouldn’t get away with this if you were writing a script. So this is a big one, City desperate for the opportunity to end their trophy drought against either Bolton Wanderers or Stoke City on May 14, their bitter city rivals hoping to set up part two of The Treble. The recent form is with United. City did the league double over United in 2007/08, but United responded with one of their own in 2008/09, and another last season when both victories were secured with injury-time winners, one from Michael Owen, the next from Paul Scholes. United have also had the better of it this season, Wayne Rooney memorably goofing around like Mark Hughes to win the recent game at Old Trafford. In fact, City’s only win in the last three campaigns has come in last year’s Carling Cup semi first leg, but United managed to even overturn that in the second match with, yes, another last-minute winner. Are City due a break? Or does this just mean United are going to pile on more agony for their neighbours? After a fallow period for this derby in the late 1990s and early 2000s, plenty of Mancunian morbo has been built up in recent years; let’s hope for another few layers of drama and nonsense today. United, by comparison… Well, there’s no need to be riffing on City’s pain any more than is totally necessary, is there. United fans will argue that not winning the FA Cup for seven years constitutes far too long a drought for a club of their size, but come on, let’s all be reasonable here. 42 years, though. 42 years! Every fan of Manchester City, as well as the entire support of Manchester United, can rattle off the numbers. It’s been 30 years since City last contested an FA Cup semi-final. It’s been 30 years since they got to the final. It’s been 35 years since they won a major trophy. And it’s been 42 years since they lifted the FA Cup. FA Cup Manchester City Manchester United Scott Murray guardian.co.uk

Posted by on April 16, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.