While not quite the only game in town, Manchester United are an elephant in the living room as far as the Manchester Evening News is concerned. They're too big to ignore and too big to offend - up to a point anyway. How to handle the United question - risk cutting off an essential story source or compromise your professional principles - is the daily challenge faced by Chris Brierly, the paper's deputy sports editor.
'First of all I must emphasise the Manchester Evening News has two very big clubs to cover, United and City,' Brierly said in his newsroom on the morning before the United-Chelsea clash this month. 'Fifty per cent of our readers are City fans so we have to cater to them. We give two pages per team a day.
'Even so, City fans accuse us of being biased. It's undeniable United have been a bigger club than City in recent years. There always seem to be massive stories blowing up around United - the Roy Keane MUTV controversy, Rio Ferdinand's drugs ban, the Glazers' takeover and so on. We want our reporters to cultivate their contacts at Old Trafford. But if there is a big story and the club deserves to be criticised then we will do it. After the loss to Middlesbrough we pulled no punches but it was a balanced piece. We do not go out on a ranting tangent like the national papers.'
