Rival Towns?

There isn't really that much in South Yorkshire. Sheffield reigns supreme.

The main one is Sheffield/Leeds, but everyone knows Sheffield is far superior anyway so it's a moot point.
 
Intresting read, I remembered finding this after my boss called me "A tribal thug" after making some comments about geordies.

Originally from http://www.sunderland-life.co.uk/pages/sport.php

Football Derbies: Geordies v Mackems
By Richard Stonehouse


Tempers often fray in local derby
To over one million people in Tyne and Wear, and an additional million more from the North East’s diaspora, the Tyne-Wear derby is, by a phenomenal margin, the most important match of the season.

Yet, to the rest of Britain and Sky’s worldwide audience, the outcome is observed with profound indifference.

However, this is an understandable, and indeed, ubiquitous attitude held by the majority of football fans concerning the encoded history of the world’s local derbies.

Without generational inculcation or knowledge of regional contexts, it is psychologically improbable that anyone will derive passionate interest in a game detached from their own team’s welfare.

The Tyne and Wear derby may be perceived by the uninitiated as a parochial and unsophisticated issue, but like the world’s greatest derbies, it has a historical conflict as its bedrock.

And if anything, as a basis for a rivalry, the Sunderland-Newcastle derby is the most pragmatic and legitimate conflict there is.

Some of the great pan-national derbies are based on issues that are trite and irrational: the historical class differences, for example, of the Milan derby, where Milan were traditionally the unionist, working-class club; Inter the upper-class, conservative option, is now moot, given Milan’s chairmanship of the right-wing Silvio Berlusconi.

Any subsequent conflict other than league upmanship is irrelevant, and their previous, historical reason for difference has now been dissipated.

The Turin, Madrid and Athens derbies can all pinpoint their violence to the notion that Juve, Real and Panathinaikos were the more affluent, royal and successful-class of support in their city, whilst Torino, Atheltico, and Olympiakos, were the working-class others; but today, without any class-based discrimination on the gates, it’s all essentially irrational dislike emanating from past conventions – the type of narrow-mindedness that non football folk relish when brandishing football supporters.

Can the root of the Arsenal-Spurs conflict, which emanated from Arsenal’s move from South London to the North in 1913 - to within an uncomfortable and anti-local-crowd-monopolising few miles of Tottenham’s ground, (hardly the epitome of imperialism) continue to constitute reason for hatred?

The Celtic-Rangers rivalry has been written about extensively, and needs no elaboration. Other than to say, that if football can act as a metaphor for international and jingoistic warfare, then the Old Firm is the most articulate; but the Tyne-Wear derby wins in its secular and concise regional conflict.

The idea that the Tyne and Wear derby is the most pragmatic and legitimate of derbies is primarily based on the fact that it predates football by 226 years.

It is a conflict that has divided two cities, 12 miles apart, for over 2 centuries.

In the epoch pre the 1600s, King Charles 1st had consistently awarded the East of England Coal Trade Rights (try to contain your excitement) to Newcastle’s coal traders, which rendered the Wearside coal merchants redundant and without a means of living. People died because of it. Coal and ships were Sunderland’s raison d’etre.

But when, in 1642, the English Civil War started, and Newcastle, with good reason, supported the Crown, Sunderland, because of the trading inequalities, sided with Cromwell’s Parliamentarians, and the division began.

It became a conflict between Sunderland’s socialist republicanism, against Newcastle’s loyalist self-interest.

A purposeful enmity if ever there was one. The fighting was based on the necessity to live and feed one’s children, and benefit one’s city, and not on, like other derbies, oblique false constructs.

Why this has remained in obscurity across the country, and in parts of the North East region, for this long, is as inexplicable as how Sven earned his melancholy-inducing salary. It needs to be known.

The political differences between Sunderland and Newcastle culminated with the battle of Boldon Hill.

A loyalist army from Newcastle and County Durham gathered to fight an anti-monarchist Sunderland and Scottish army at a field equidistant between the two towns.

The joint Scottish and Sunderland army won – and Newcastle was colonised by the Scottish. It was subsequently used as a Republican military base for the rest of war.

And whilst this is a lucid basis for two cities hating each other, it has, like every other modern-day derby, developed profoundly irrational manifestations.

It has been noted that some Newcastle fans refuse to buy bacon, because of its ‘red and white appearance’: the pinnacle, regardless of any jovial flippancy, of irrational behaviour; and likewise, the past Mackem boycotting of a particular breakfast cereal, because of the Newcastle-orientated marketing push of its brand, is silly beyond words.

However, these are benign occurrences.

In March 2000, over 70 Sunderland and Newcastle hooligans took part in some of the worst football-related violence ever seen in the U.K.

What the police called “usually respectable men and fathers”, had decided to meet in mutual territory with their “enemies”, to fight with knives, bats and bricks.

Sunderland fans boarded a ferry towards North Tyneside, found the awaiting ‘army’, and fought. One man was left permanently brain damaged. There was nothing tangible to fight for. Yet tens and tens of people were arrested, and years upon years of prison-time was sentenced.

Whilst this wasn’t a biological, genetic or neurological inheritance from the past, it was neither rooted in football.

The continuation of the current tensions involves a new sense of injustice.

For well over a decade, Sunderland’s population has bemoaned, without any activist action, that they have been paying their local taxes to finance both the Newcastle Metro and Airport – both of which are limitedly available to them.

A rigid bias towards Tyneside in the regional and national media further compounds a collective feeling of inequality.

It seems like history is repeating itself for the people of Sunderland - albeit in a less livelihood-threatening sort of way. Perhaps a more trivial, city-image-concerned sort of way.

And so it seems that the Tyne-Wear derbies are, as opposed to the Council Chambers, where societal grievances are most fiercely manifested.

But this makes little sense.

You would expect better from the people contesting the world’s most pragmatic derby. Although, as either Ian Wright, or was it Aristotle, said, ‘people often systematically deviate from canons of logic’.

Let’s just hope that despite the increasing hijacking of the game by the corporate classes, and the working-class ostracising that comes with it, there still remains in the future, terraces from which Mackems and Geordies can vent their invariably abusive opinions of each other without violence and need for civil war.
 
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