Sergio Aguero’s elbow on Winston Reid ensured there was plenty to get stuck into a full 13 days before the Manchester derby.
It didn’t take long for hundreds of United supporters to frantically (or pathetically) tweet the FA in a bid to get the Argentine banned. When some City fans then claimed the governing body was biased because its Twitter picture showed United lifting a trophy - the Football Association Community Shield - you knew this wasn’t going to be any old game.
The media were also rounded on, with City fans insisting ‘the agenda’ had once again surfaced when pictures of the Aguero incident were splashed on the back pages of several British newspapers.
The build-up was in full swing, and there hadn’t even been a mention of the Jose Mourinho-Pep Guardiola rivalry by this point.
In Spain, though, it is the two managers that have propelled the Premier League clash up the news agenda. The Manchester derby has become a blockbuster event on the English football calendar in recent years, but it is the arrival of Pep and Mou that has caught the imagination abroad.
This is Barcelona versus Real Madrid by proxy. “When Guardiola wins it is seen as a reinforcement of his ideals, of Barcelona’s ideals. When he loses - and especially if it’s at the hands of Mourinho - it is used to attack those ideals,” as a Spanish source put it this week.
The overwhelming popularity of the two , as well as the intense rivalry between the pair, has added extra significance to this historic English fixture.
It is hard to imagine a non-Spanish sporting event that could ever knock Barcelona off the front pages of Sport and Mundo Deportivo, or stop Marca and AS analysing every little piece of Madrid news, but Saturday’s Manchester derby has enjoyed its fair share of column inches over the past week.
It is not surprising to see scores of articles chronicling the history of the rivalry between the clubs or the two managers, nor pieces on the price of attending the game or even how Manchester is currently the capital of English football, but they would not normally appear in the online and print versions of Spain’s biggest media outlets. This week, Marca has dedicated one full page to anything related to the derby, and its website even more.
