• Premier League

How spirited United 'won' Manchester derby

Wayne Rooney's nutmeg of Vincent Kompany summed up a determined fightback from Manchester United © Getty Images

Enlarge

Manchester United beat Manchester City 0-1 yesterday. That was clear for all to see. The team that collected the three points from the derby were actually the losers. The old order has been re-established and this showed in everything except the numbers.

It's not that Manchester United "deserved" to win. Football, uniquely among sports, is nuts about the concept of deserts: every Saturday afternoon the reports from around the grounds will tell you: "Rovers are 1-0 up and they just about deserve it".

And United deserved to lose, if you must have it that way: a hat-trick of penalties turned down, at least 2.5 of them incorrectly, while Chris Smalling left his brain hanging up with his blazer in the changing-room and earned himself the season's least controversial sending-off.

But United still walk away with more than City. True, their central defence is shot to hell, with Smalling suspended and Marcos Rojo out with a dislocated shoulder, but so what? One team fell apart on Sunday while the other found oceans of altogether unexpected strength of spirit. And that's what actually matters.

So OK, this was a spiritual victory, and I know there ain't no room on the scoreboard for spirit. But in all sports such incomputables matter - and they tend to matter more in football because so many football matches turn on a single incident.

City were as woeful a set of winners as the season has shown us. They were in a position to put three or four goals past United: lashes that have lasting and devastating effect on a team. They could have had United doubting themselves for weeks or even months: sending them back to the sad lost days of poor David Moyes's season.

Chris Smalling left his brain in the changing-room by picking up two yellow cards against Manchester City © Getty Images

Enlarge

Related Links

• News: Scholes 'expected progress' under big spender Van Gaal
  
• Mishits: Edgar Allen Roo? England striker's poetry secret
  
• News: Carrick ready to respond to United emergency
  
• News: Neville: Van Persie failing to meet expectations
  
• News: Racial abuse reported to police as Toure rejoins Twitter
  

But City did nothing of the kind. They took the lead and panicked. They reverted to the role of upstarts. A desperate feeling of unworthiness swept through them. They were unable to administer the whipping: they were unable to score the insurance goal: they were damn lucky to hold on.

That's because United found the noble spirit of defiance: of futile heroism. They savoured the profound joy of finding glory in defeat. There were fine performances in defence from the stripling, Paddy McNair, and from Michael Carrick, not an obvious centre-half but carrying on his own great tradition of turning quiet competence into an art form. And going forward United let rip in joyful fashion and would have equalised but for a man-of-the-match-worthy save from City's keeper Joe Hart.

It was demonstration of old champions against upstarts. City are still not a team, as their performances in Europe have shown us this season. They look great when they're great, but you expect that. It's finding greatness when things are going wrong that counts. And only one side did that yesterday.

United fell back on their great traditions. They looked like a club with meaning, with bottom, with tradition. Wayne Rooney went thundering forward in a manner that reminded me of his early days as a teenage sensation playing for England in the European Championship of 2004: a fearless master of collision.

This was a side inspired. They looked like a team that's going somewhere. After a ghastly season last time around and a pretty dodgy start to this one, they trumpeted out the message that they will have something to show us before May is here and the skies are full of swifts.

Football is full of things you can't actually put down on the score-sheet and the league table. Managers know this and hide behind them for as long as the going is good. Writers and commentators and pundits and people in phone-ins and pubs and around water-coolers and dinner-tables discuss such things every day.

And though you can talk and write endless amounts of nonsense about such things, the basic idea is not nonsense at all. More than most sports, football is about spirit, and yesterday Manchester United showed they have refound theirs.

True, they're getting last-minute goals to draw rather than win these days, and true, they didn't actually get the goal they needed for the draw yesterday. These things do tend to undermine my argument. But they showed that they have spirit, and spirit is something that takes you onwards and upwards.

At this point I can hear a football cynic in full scoffing mode: well, if you're paid millions of quids for playing football the least you can do is play with spirit. But it's not as simple as that. It's not just about trying frightfully hard. Every player on the pitch was trying hard. Spirit and effort are not the same thing at all: nor are sprit and commitment.

City tried hard and showed immense commitment: but that didn't do them any good when United took over toward the end and gave it a real go. Their own spirit was overwhelmed. I remember a fight in one of the great Modesty Blaise thrillers, in which Modesty's opponent felt that "the huge outpouring of her ki had overwhelmed his entire self and spirit".

That's roughly what happened to City, and their three points don't mask the fact that in those closing minutes they were mastered. That's a memory that will return the next time they are hard-pressed and up against it.

United go in the opposite direction. They take from this defeat a sense of optimism and purpose, a shared belief that that they can make the damn thing work again.

You can make a complex and accurate technical case about United's weaknesses in defence and their lack of shared experience as a unit, and you'd be right and you'll be proved right. But in the intangibles of yesterday's defeat there is real hope, for they looked like a side of purpose. City left knowing that another victory like that and they're done for. But United can make this defeat the beginning of the long and winding road that leads back to greatness.

© ESPN Sports Media Ltd