Why Manchester City fans must stop singing about Munich

In the week when a dramatisation of the 1958 Manchester United air disaster was on television it seemed somehow inevitable that Manchester City fans would be accused of disrespectful Munich chants, though speaking as one who attended the game, the behaviour of the visiting supporters at Blackburn Rovers on Monday was not as bad as might be imagined from some of the more hysterical reports.

Call me dozy or unobservant if you like, but it was only in the press room afterwards when a colleague asked if I had heard anti-Munich chants from the City fans that I realised anything untoward may have taken place. Said colleague hadn't heard any anti-Munich chants either, but had been alerted to a situation via his Twitter feed where people were discussing the acceptability or otherwise of City's new song about Yaya Touré scoring the winner against United at Wembley a week previously. In case you are still in the dark, City fans now sing: "Who put the ball in the Munichs' net? Yaya, Yaya."

So there you are. Callous insensitivity, or manufactured controversy? Probably somewhere in between. Obviously it would be preferable if City did not use the label "Munichs" as a derogatory term for their neighbours and rivals, but they do, and have been using it for many years. Regrettable as that may be, and distasteful as the whole topic might appear to anyone with a normal sense of values, it is possibly worth saying that the use of a nickname is not quite as offensive as imitating aeroplanes and singing the infamous runway song.

Manchester City have ejected and banned people for doing that in the past, and are understandably worried that one or two idiots may take their hatred of United too far and tarnish the FA Cup final with similar behaviour, though asking supporters to find an alternative, less provocative nickname for their least favourite club would be a much taller order.

Rare is the football rivalry, for instance, where one side does not speak of the other in the most hurtful and disparaging way possible. It would be easy to use Glasgow to illustrate the point, but as forces outside football are clearly at work there, and so much has been said on the subject in recent weeks, let's go to Merseyside instead.

Everton routinely call Liverpool "Red shite", while every Evertonian in Liverpool eyes is a "Bitter Blue". Bitter because Everton were deprived entry to the European Cup owing to the ban that Liverpool supporters brought about by their behaviour at Heysel, and have blamed their rivals ever since for the break-up of that title-winning side and the subsequent slide into mediocrity that may have been prevented had Everton been able to generate income and exposure in Europe for a few years in the way that Liverpool themselves pioneered.

Not every Everton supporter actually feels that way, though some certainly do, yet "Bitter Blue" is a classic insult because it manages to offend everyone, which is why Liverpool fans are so fond of it. Offending the other lot is what football rivals like to do, though it is debatable whether City fans are trying to offend United fans with the term "Munichs" as much as differentiate themselves from the event that defines the other half of Manchester. Reviewing the programme United in these pages on Monday, Richard Williams noted that the drama showed how the Old Trafford club came to acquire a special place in the hierarchy of football, and how a near-universal sympathy endured throughout the years in which Matt Busby and Jimmy Murphy led United back to success with a team that everyone could admire.

It is a great story as well as a tragic one, but how were City supposed to react to it? What could the other club in Manchester do, short of packing up and going home in the knowledge they could never compete with such a powerful backstory, a mythology carefully layered into United's present-day omnipotence? Mancunians of either persuasion who lived through the tragedy and the 10-year aftermath culminating in the 1968 European Cup final appear to have coexisted with a dignified respect, though for subsequent generations of City fans the word Munich is little more than a historical signifier that denotes United.

Liverpool fans have often been the ones who have sought to goad United with aeroplane impressions and specific chants about 1958. City supporters, or at least a proportion of them, simply use references to Munich to define United, and by extension themselves. There is a difference, and I have come across City supporters who say they would never chant anything unpleasant or inflammatory about Munich but see no issue with using the word itself as shorthand for United and their supporters.

I am not sure if that is a worthwhile distinction, and it would probably be best for all references to Munich to be laid to rest and left in the past where they belong. Except United have no intention of doing that, and the story is such an emotive one that it seems dramas and documentaries will always be with us. I doubt that Sunday's TV show prompted Monday's Touré chant, I reckon City supporters prefer the extra sting of a word such as Munichs to blander, safer alternatives.

I am fairly certain, however, that what happened at Blackburn on Monday was nothing compared with a Manchester derby at Maine Road 11 years ago, when the home fans were giving full throat to "Who's that lying on the runway…" and the United fans were responding that City would go down "like a Russian submarine" (the Kursk disaster was taking place in the Barents Sea at the time, with the loss of 118 lives).

I made the mistake, if that's what it was, of mentioning the much louder City chants in my match report, arguing that a Manchester derby ought to be the very last place to hear the memory of a Manchester tragedy defiled. Matt Busby played more than 200 games for City, after all, and a former City goalkeeper turned football reporter, Frank Swift, perished at Munich. I imagined any reasonable person would agree, but City fans took the hump, making such a fuss in fanzines and websites that I ended up on Radio Manchester trying to explain myself. The interview (from memory) went something like this:

RM: You don't seem to be very popular with City fans at the moment, Paul.

Me: No, but all I said was that no one in Manchester ought to be singing songs about Munich.

RM: I'm sure we all agree with that, but why didn't you mention what the United fans were singing?

The correct answer would have been that I was not so familiar with that chant and it hadn't been quite clear enough to pick out the words. A bit like the situation at Blackburn on Monday, but you know how these things go. I was concentrating on the game, not a few hundred voices in the Darwen End. I'll recognise it next time. If 25,000 people are singing it at Wembley the whole country will recognise it.