CONSIDERING Wanderers’ opponents on Saturday and the fact there have been a few examples around the fixture list this weekend, it seems as good a time as any to ask: Just what is a derby?
Derby, proper noun, capital letter, is an East Midlands city with a pretty good football team, of that there is little argument.
But derby, lower case, is a footballing phrase that gets kicked around more often than Lionel Messi would in the Bolton Vets Federation.
The purists would have you believe it can only indicate a game between two teams from the same city or town, a la the Merseyside derby between Liverpool and Everton.
Those kind of games are rarer than you think. Obviously Manchester, Sheffield, Bristol, Edinburgh (Hearts v Hibs), Glasgow (Rangers v Celtic), and Nottingham count – even the most hardened derby pedant would accept that.
London is universally agreed to be too large to home a proper derby. It needs to be divided into regions like north (Arsenal-Spurs), west (Chelsea-QPR), east (West Ham-Millwall) or south (Palace-Charlton).
But how close do you really need to be to class a team as your local rival?
Newcastle United and Sunderland contest the Tyne-Wear derby and are separated by 16 miles. Fair dos.
Portsmouth and Southampton contest the superbly-named El Classic-oast, and rest 18 miles apart.
But Cardiff City and Swansea claim derby status and are 41 miles apart; that is 628 football pitches laid end to end. Surely their only link is that they are both Welsh? And in that case, Carlisle United should share a derby with Bournemouth.
Ipswich and Norwich have the East Anglian derby but Portman Road and Carrow Road are 43 miles away from each other. That would be like Wanderers claiming a derby with Huddersfield.
It is when you start bringing in the rivalry argument that you can really set the proverbial cat among the pigeons – or to put it another way, spark a feline-avian metaphorical derby.
Manchester United against Leeds United isn’t a derby. I don’t care what it says on Wikipedia, or how many songs the club have about each other.
It doesn’t matter how much Brighton hates Crystal Palace, it isn’t a derby.
It gets more trivial as you travel further down the Football League. Colchester United and Southend United claim a derby by virtue of the fact they are in the same county, while Hereford and Shrewsbury share a derby because they are connected by the A49.
The same can be said of the so-called river derbies.
Grimsby v Hull v Scunthorpe are Humber derbies, apparently, while Cardiff, Newport and the Bristol clubs contest the Severnside derbies. Do me a favour!
What next? Stoke City v Southampton in the red and white-striped derby? Cambridge United v Reading in the Dave Kitson derby? Hull City (only team whose letters cannot be coloured in) v St Johnstone (only club in Britain that has a letter ‘J’ in it) in the pointless football trivia derby?
Get a grip folks.
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