Culture
What Ruben Amorim can expect from his first Manchester derby: Vomit, hostility and a proper rivalry
Ruben Amorim has faced a range of clubs during his first six games as Manchester United head coach, from Arsenal in the Premier League to Bodo/Glimt in the Europa League.
Those six matches have brought positives, negatives and mixed results, but his opponents on Sunday, Manchester City, will pose a different challenge.
Pep Guardiola’s side go into the game at the Etihad looking a shadow of their dominant selves, winners of the past four Premier League titles, but derby days are different, even if Amorim is playing down its significance.
“I just want to improve the team so I cannot treat it like a normal derby,” he said on Thursday evening.
“It should be like two great teams fighting for the title, and it is not that in this moment. So it is just one more game with a very good opponent. Both teams are struggling in the moment so I hope in future I can feel that real feeling of a derby (that has title implications).”
While that is certainly true about the form and prospects of the two teams, it is still a game that means a little bit more.
To give United’s new head coach a taste of what to expect, The Athletic spoke to three United legends about what it’s like to play City away. From vomit to respect to moments they’ll treasure, this is what they had to say.
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer: ‘To beat Guardiola is a moment to cherish’
Solskjaer played more than 350 matches for United between 1996 and 2007 before later becoming manager between 2018 and 2021.
Here he speaks about losing at City’s former ground Main Road, scoring against his former United team-mate Peter Schmeichel and then winning three away derbies in a row as United manager.
“It’s not hostile at their place, not really. But it’s a proper rivalry. Sometimes it’s easier away from home against them. At Old Trafford, you have more of a responsibility to open up and try to dominate.
“It’s unusual to be the underdog with United because it certainly wasn’t like that when I played… though we did lose 3-1 at (City’s previous ground) Maine Road. I scored against Peter Schmeichel that day (lead image above) but I did not enjoy that one and Gary Neville did not have his best of games. Sir Alex dished it out afterwards, he was furious.
GO DEEPER
Putting the ‘Manc’ back in the Manchester derby
“But we were underdogs when I was manager. I’ve looked at our three consecutive wins there. We averaged 35 per cent possession but still beat them three times away. We did that with width and pace. Anto (Anthony Martial) was brilliant in those games. He had a lot of stick but in those matches, he dropped in to create spaces so it was harder for City to defend. He and Bruno Fernandes were very important in possession.
Martial after scoring against City in 2019 (Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images)
“They batter you in the beginning. Good possession, width. You expect an onslaught but in the 2021 game, we started well, scored and surprised them. We set up a team to stop them.
“City have dominated so many games against United so you are trying to do what you can so fans can hold their heads up high in work the next day. What I did — and what Erik ten Hag did in the 2024 FA Cup final — was set up a team to hurt them when they are out of balance.
“Guardiola was always respectful and I have huge respect for him, he’s an incredible manager. But for any manager to beat him, that’s a moment to cherish. And we did it three times on the bounce. We should’ve played away at City every weekend!
Solskjaer and Pep Guardiola on the touchline (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
“I joke, but the wins felt good. City and Liverpool are the two games for United fans — and they’re the worst when you lose. So I told my players to go out afterwards and enjoy it. They weren’t the types to go out around Manchester, maybe they’d go out in quieter areas. I didn’t go out after the games to celebrate, I had work to do.
“At the end of the game in 2019, I looked towards the away end. 3,000 hardcore fans. My kids were in there. They saw beer being thrown at the United section — at least it was the same colour as beer. The fans were singing, ‘Ole’s at the wheel’ at the end. ‘Tell me how good does it feel?’. I’ll tell you, it feels absolutely wonderful. It’s not a trophy, but it’s those days that you play and manage for.”
Andy Cole: ‘We’re back to those old days’
Cole played nearly 300 matches for United between 1994 and 2002 before later joining City for the 2005-06 season.
Here he discusses the importance of the derby to fans, how he was treated when he moved to City and why Amorim should just enjoy the day.
“City away with United. Love it. Almost always enjoyable, as was the build-up. But I’m talking about when City were at Maine Road. Our team coach would pass by all those terraced houses in Moss Side, a setting that gets the juices flowing. Some of their fans would be flicking the Vs and you’re thinking, ‘This is what it’s about’. If you can’t get yourself up for these games then you’re going to struggle.
“If you ask me what my highlights were, I’m going to give you a one-word answer: winning. I scored in one at Maine Road, but derbies are all about the result, regardless of the game. Win and all is good. Lose and it isn’t.
“But I also played for City against United in a derby. And won. Maybe some City fans were a bit iffy when I joined them because I’d been at United and I’ve never hidden my loyalty to this day. But I gave 100 per cent in every single game I played for City. I was professional, I had bills to pay.
“I played in a famous game in 2006 when we won 3-1. Didn’t score, did all right. Patrice Evra made his debut and Cristiano Ronaldo was sent off. I played with Darius Vassell, Stephen Ireland and Trevor Sinclair. Richard Dunne and Sylvain Distin were decent with Sun Jihai in defence. Top player technically, Sun. David James in net. You’re getting a decent ‘keeper with Jamo.
Cole playing against United for City in 2006 (Paul Barker/AFP via Getty Images)
“United fans were brilliant with me, even though I was with City. I’m just a lucky guy. I didn’t know what to expect and some of the other boys who played for both clubs got some stick, but it’s about how you conduct yourself. And I conducted myself well, with respect.
“If I was speaking to Ruben Amorim before this game, I’d say, ‘Enjoy it, it’s a great occasion. And an even greater day if you win’. You’re involved in the Manchester derby, it’s a privilege. The sad thing this season is that you have two teams not in the best of form. So we’re back to those old days, where you have no idea what is going to happen. A proper derby.”
Patrice Evra: ‘And then the vomiting started’
Evra made nearly 400 appearances for United between 2005 and 2014.
Here he speaks about his difficult debut in January 2006 and why it is important for Amorim’s players to show willing on Sunday.
“The kick-off was at 12 for my first United game, which was against City away. The noisy neighbours. I’d not played a game that early since I was a child. I saw Mikael Silvestre eating pasta at nine in the morning, so I joined him. And then the vomiting started. I thought that was the end of the day for me but it stopped. Now I know it was an allergy, but at the time, was I going to miss a debut like that? I didn’t mention it to anyone.
“It’s one of my clearest memories because it was a disaster and made me realise that I wasn’t ready for the Premier League. This wasn’t what we thought was going to happen. Even as a new player, I knew Sir Alex had a great record against City. But being at home made them confident,
“From the start, Trevor Sinclair kept running past me and leaving me on my ass. I was in shock. I’d played in the Champions League final and for France and there I was on my backside.
“City targeted me, the new boy, hitting long balls to Sinclair who ran straight at me. He scored and was involved in a second goal just before half-time.
Evra struggled on his debut against Sinclair and City (John Peters/Manchester United via Getty Images)
“I was taken off after Ferguson spent the break shouting at us and I couldn’t understand a word. He still got his message across. I have said before what he told me or how Carlos Queiroz translated it into French. ‘Evra! That’s enough! Now you can sit down, watch the game and start to learn to play English football in another game!’. When Queiroz told me I wasn’t going back on, I didn’t argue.
“Nemanja Vidic played his first game too. He stayed on the pitch. We lost 3-1. My agent Luca was there with his wife. It got worse because this was supposed to be a great moment for him. He came to see me at the hotel. I opened the door and he nearly cried when he saw me. Even his wife looked sad for me. I didn’t feel sad, I felt s***, empty, especially after the way Ferguson had talked to me.
“I hope Ruben Amorim has a better experience than I had. When I look at the game this weekend, I don’t know who will win, but I do know the fans will not forgive you if you don’t run, tackle or give your best. Even if you are losing, you have to never give up.
“United have had a bad season, but that was the same last season and United beat City in the FA Cup final.
“For Amorim, he beat City a few weeks ago (while in charge of Sporting CP in the Champions League) but now he’s at a different team. It will be tough, but I only want to see red shirts on the streets of Manchester on Monday.”
(Top photo: Gary M. Prior/Getty Images)
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
-
Detroit, MI23 minutes agoChris Simms projects Detroit Lions first-round NFL draft pick
-
San Francisco, CA35 minutes agoSan Francisco sets $3.4B price tag for public takeover of PG&E
-
Dallas, TX41 minutes agoGame Day Guide: Stars at Wild | Dallas Stars
-
Miami, FL47 minutes agoMay a steadying presence as Cards hold off Marlins in Miami
-
Boston, MA53 minutes agoTyrese Maxey, VJ Edgecombe flex in Boston: Takeaways from Celtics-76ers Game 2
-
Denver, CO59 minutes agoMotorcyclist seriously injured in Denver hit-and-run crash – AOL
-
Seattle, WA1 hour agoBrock: 2 drafts fits at edge rusher for Seattle Seahawks
-
San Diego, CA1 hour agoJoseph Allen Oviatt – San Diego Union-Tribune