Manchester City V Manchester United

Sir Alex Ferguson

Manchester United lock horns with fel­low title con­tenders and neigh­bours Manchester City at Eti­had Sta­dium this Monday in what prom­ises to be a cracker of a con­test. Sir Alex Ferguson´s team were held to a 4–4 draw at home to Ever­ton on Sunday, while The Cit­izens man­aged to defeat Wol­ver­hamp­ton 2–0 at the Molineux Sta­dium.

This Manchester derby match will def­in­itely be the most import­ant encounter of the whole league cam­paign. The Manchester United play­ers go into the fix­ture top of the Barclays Premier League with long­time crosstown adversar­ies Manchester City a mere three points behind them in the table. Just for the sake of stat­ist­ics, there have been 162 com­pet­it­ive meet­ings between these two giants of the Eng­lish game with The Manchester Reds ahead with 68 vic­tor­ies against Manchester City’s 44. The last time the Manchester rivals played each other was in the FA Cup Third Round back in Janu­ary when The Red Dev­ils ran out fully deserved 3–2 win­ners over Roberto Mancini´s Manchester City side at the Eti­had Sta­dium thanks to a double from Wayne Rooney and a single from Danny Wel­beck. Sir Alex Fer­guson: “I sup­pose that when the fix­tures came out at the begin­ning of the sea­son all roads poin­ted to this match. It was inev­it­able maybe. But we are where we are and it doesn’t mat­ter what has happened before. The buildup to the game, who has dropped points and who hasn’t dropped points, it really is all down to this game. It will be a fant­astic atmo­sphere and I hope the game lives up to the billing. I do not know how many coun­tries will be watch­ing the derby match, but it will be con­sid­er­able and hope­fully it is a very good game. Manchester United are also smart­ing from throw­ing that game away last week against Ever­ton, but in the con­text of our his­tory we almost expec­ted it. We make it hard for ourselves; our fans have been sub­jec­ted to that drama for years and years. God knows what they are like just now but hope­fully we will make amends on Monday.”

Manchester City V Manchester United
Manchester City Pro­vi­sional Squad: Joe Hart, Pablo Zabaleta, Gael Clichy, Yaya Toure, Joleon Lescott, Gareth Barry, Vin­cent Kom­pany, David Silva, Car­los Tevez, Samir Nasri, Ser­gio Aguero, Costel Pantili­mon, Micah Richards, James Mil­ner, Mario Balo­telli, Nigel de Jong, Edin Dzeko, Aleksander Kolarov. Manchester United Pro­vi­sional Squad: David de Gea, Ben Amos, Rafael Pereira da Silva, Phil Jones, Chris Smalling, Jonny Evans, Rio Ferdin­and, Fabio Pereira da Silva, Patrice Evra, Ant­o­nio Valen­cia, Ji-sung Park, Paul Scholes, Tom Clev­er­ley, Michael Car­rick, Ash­ley Young, Wayne Rooney, Luis Nani, Ryan Giggs, Danny Wel­beck, Javier Hernan­dez, Dim­itar Ber­batov, Michael Owen.

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