The Sunday Times:
For a few minutes late in the first half, Gary Neville’s popularity among Liverpool supporters increased by 100%. Neville had arrived as the most detested man at Anfield, but for a brief spell Wayne Rooney took his place after kissing his Manchester United badge and making a gesture with his fingers — deliberately ambiguous visually but unmistakably contemptuous in meaning — in front of the Kop. Neville had slipped to second spot in the Scouser hate stakes but reclaimed his title long before full-time, upon which he ran down the tunnel offering sarcastic applause to those who had baited him.
By then, none of it mattered, the endless "Who started it?" debates that clog up fan phone-ins and the Punch and Judy show of insult and counter-insult between supporters and players. A working man, an honest grafter at that, was on his way to hospital, his leg in ruins, his livelihood in doubt. That Liverpool fans sang a gleeful song about Alan Smith as he lay on a stretcher trying to choke back the pain, his leg broken so horrifically that it evoked memories of David Busst, merely rendered all this enmity over a little football game even more a moronic pantomime.
So Liverpool versus Manchester United fancies itself as a "game of hate". Great. Let the nastiness continue until it begins to rival Old Firm clashes, days dreaded by the A&E wards of Glasgow hospitals, days when the murder rate in the city shows a tendency to rise. It’s pointless to suggest that, after decades of dislike, Liverpool and United fans should suddenly act like a lawn bowls crowd when their sides come together. Football is built on rivalries, after all. But we like to think it has moved on a little. There was even a reminder, unheeded, of the game’s black past when the stadium DJ played a song in remembrance of Hillsborough.
Because it was an FA Cup tie, and ticket allocations for the away team are greater than for league games, there was double the normal number of United supporters (6,500) at Anfield. Merseyside Police mounted one of their biggest matchday operations in a generation, faced with what they estimated as the largest gathering of United fans in Liverpool since the 1985 FA Cup semi-final at Goodison Park.