UTD Unscripted: The birth of a rivalry

Arsenal weren’t happy with the penalty we got to open the scoring and the game started getting tetchy towards the end before finally spilling over in the tunnel afterwards. You hear about players throwing pizza at each other and, while that is obviously a bit petty, it made me think back to where the rivalry between United and Arsenal really began.

For a lot of people, that was the bust-up the two teams had at Old Trafford in 1990. There had been a little bit of previous going into that one – we’d won a feisty league game at our place a couple of years earlier, Choccy and Nigel Winterburn had a running battle at Highbury in the FA Cup the year after that and on the opening day of 1989/90,…