The Rivals Game Inside the British Football Derby

Why do football fans choose one club over another in cities where intense, deep-seated rivalries exist? What makes them choose: family ties, politics, religion, race? 'Rivals Game' author Douglas Beattie spent two years getting underneath at Britain's biggest derbies to discover the answers and encover the history of football's fiercest rivalries. Beattie takes the reader to those matches that are regularly built up by the media as passionate, divisive and vitally important for the entire cities they are played in. These are the games that have a history of violence, fueds, social unrest and bigotry. But what is the truth about the origins behind these entrenched rivalries? And how does the enmity, so often displayed by supporters and, gleefully, by the media, reveal itself in modern times?With divisions going back as far as the English Civil War and preconceptions - mostly wrong - littering the landscape, Douglas visited Sheffield, Birmingham, north London, Manchester, Liverpool, the north east, Edinburgh and Glasgow to discover the answer to question such as, why do the citizens of Sheffield call each other 'Pigs', who was Wallace Mercer, the man who divided Edinburgh, what is it like to spend a day with Birmingham City's Zulu hooligans, why do the theme tune of 'Z Cars' and a banana loom large in the history of the supposed 'friendly' Merseyside derby, and who really eats prawn sandwiches in Manchester?