So, it looks increasingly likely that this year's Premiership title race will be a straight duel between Manchester City and Manchester United. City, who have the lead over their city rivals, are rightly being considered the favourites but anyone who has been watching English football over the last 20 years will know that counting out United is a foolish move indeed. Ferguson's teams have a history of coming good in the last third of the season and Mancini will need to keep an eye out for a late surge from across the city over the coming months.
If City do stay strong and take the title back to the City of Manchester stadium it will be their first league victory since 1968. Over those 44 years their rivals from the red half of Manchester have amassed a beguiling 12 Premier League championships and 2
Champions Leagues, so to say City have been waiting a while for this
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chance is a massive understatement.
The two sides have played a grand total of 162 professional, competitive matches since 1881 when Newton Heath (the original name for the club who would soon be renamed Manchester United) trashed West Gorton (who would become City) 3-0. Though at the time both of these teams were just two of many Manchester clubs who had sprung up in the wake of the founding of the Football Association in 1863, they would go on to become the two most dominant teams in the city over the next twenty years.
The first top flight league game between the two clubs did not come until 1906 with City reversing the score line from their first ever meeting and hammering their rivals 3-0 at their Hyde Road ground. For most of the next century, however, it would be Manchester United who dominated football in the city, collecting numerous titles throughout the fifties, sixties and nineties while City only managed two league victories in that time.
This season it looks like they may get the chance to change that. With city pride and hundreds of years of history on the line, this should be a title race to remember.