Pride, passion and pancakes - Which is Britain's fiercest derby?

By Matt Barlow for the Daily Mail
Updated: 04:30 EST, 28 November 2008

Pride, passion and pancakes, that’s the idea of a local derby, so-named (it is thought) after the general anarchy of traditional Shrove Tuesday football games in various Derbyshire towns.

That’s one ball, hundreds of players and several casualties. Remove the ball and wait to see if anyone notices. There we would see how brave Cristiano  Ronaldo really is.

• HAVE YOUR SAY - TELL US WHICH DERBY MATCH YOU THINK IS THE FIERCEST USING THE COMMENTS SECTION BELOW...

Even in modern professional football, where the value of pancakes has been lost  amid the clutter of nutritionists and conditioning coaches, the shuddering  tribal roar remains a key element.

Scroll down for more

Unconstrained joy: Then manager Neil Warnock celebrates a United victory in the Steel City derby against Wednesday

The blood is stirred by a decent derby. Derbyshire, ironically, cannot muster  one. The county’s two professional clubs - Derby and Chesterfield - face in different directions. Derby towards Nottingham and Chesterfield towards Sheffield.

Ah, yes, the Steel City, football’s birthplace, let’s start there, where Sheffield United and Wednesday represents perhaps the finest examples of an  English derby.

Here are two historic clubs, well-supported by folk with limited horizons and a healthy shared loathing of Leeds United, a club which can perhaps trace its perpetual anger to its only-child status.

Almost 50,000 turned up at Hillsborough when the Blades and the Owls met in  Division Three in 1979. Beat that Bristol or East Lancs.

Overwhelming success has eluded the Sheffield clubs, shielding them from one of  the genuine threats to derby passion.

True animosity is diluted when one club decide they have bigger fish to fry.  Take what are perhaps considered to be the three great top flight derbies of modern English football.

Manchester- where United have been Liverpool-obsessed for so many years that  their rivalries have become confused.

Liverpool - where the same is true in reverse.

Scroll down for more

Can get ugly: Manchester United versus Liverpool

North London - where Arsenal have become so superior to Spurs and their team so  un-English that the players think United and Chelsea are the big games.

The top clubs are in grave danger of shifting towards the continental view of a derby - the clash between the strongest teams, the superclasicos like Real Madrid and Barcelona.

It only takes a fraction of a club to be distracted for the local focus to lose its edge. The fiercest derby atmospheres have been built over decades, where rivals have risen and fallen together, where both sides have enjoyed the upper hand at various times.

Silverware has not interfered with the Tyne-Wear rivalry or that in the Black Country between West Brom and Wolves. As a result these derbies remain great  sporting occasions.

Aston Villa and Birmingham, after being apart for so long, locked horns with frenzied energy at the turn of the last century, to prove the Second City retains its spirit.

Scroll down for more

Explosive: Celtic versus Rangers

But by far the best derby in Britain is found north of the border. It is enmity rather than rivalry between Rangers and Celtic, founded on sectarian grounds and intensified by their total domination of Scottish football.

• NOW YOU HAVE YOUR SAY - TELL US WHICH DERBY MATCH YOU THINK IS THE FIERCEST USING THE COMMENTS SECTION BELOW...

Unlike in England, where the quest for glory has deflected the biggest clubs from their regional squabbles, the Old Firm slug it out every year for the national prize.

Four times a year in the SPL, plus occasional cup ties, Glasgow braces itself for another collision.

They are the biggest games of the season, no question.

Not only does the result determine bragging rights and spark fights across the city but, due to the predictable nature of Scottish football, it will probably decide the destiny of the title too.