Manchester derby is now a state occasion and Sunday's game somehow managed to match the hype As is now customary, derby day had begun at dawn on Sky Sports News. From early morning, the channel stood a reporter outside the ground, whom they intercut with not one, but several separate shots of the deserted interior. This should perhaps have been a clue that everyone needed to go and do something else for a while and reconvene at lunchtime. Instead, we got Clayton Blackmore, a visual reminder of the days when United were so ordinary they had players like Clayton Blackmore. "Get in their face," he urged the current side. You can't be giving players too much respect. You've got to get in their face. Eventually, and understandably, the real pundits took over. The likes of Blackmore might get you the odd cliché now and then, but there really is no substitute for your seasoned cliché-performers, veterans of the cliché, men who have been churning out clichés week in, week out, at the highest level, for years. "What a marker it would put down for United to beat them," Graeme Souness said before the match. Psychologically, it would be a real punch in the nose for City. "You don't win titles in December," Martin Tyler said, "but you do put down markers and send out messages." For City v United is no longer simply a football match, but a grand occasion of state, an event of national standing. It has its own space in the calendar, its own lexicon ("noisy neighbours," "welcome to Manchester," "why always me?"), a unique stranglehold on the news agenda. Waft in the irresistible musk of the Hollywood A-list and what results is a sort of attention-tornado: a virtuous vortex of fame and import, and sent messages, and strewn markers, that comfortably transcends whatever Pablo Zabaleta chooses to do on the day. The remarkable thing about Sunday's match was that it somehow managed to live up to the hype. It had blood (that of Rio Ferdinand, like Cruise a man who does all his own stunts), farce (Samir Nasri's insistence that a body-double take his place in the City free-kick wall) and late tragedy, as Robin van Persie's injury-time goal cruelly denied Duvall the penalty shoot-out he had so been looking forward to. Souness was livid at Nasri's cowardice. "Are you prepared to take a blow for the cause?" he asked pointedly. He should have just taken it in the face. What's the worst that can happen? Perhaps Nasri had been watching Sky, and was worried about getting punched in the nose or got at in the face. Perhaps he was not ducking out of the ball's path at all, but simply stooping to pick up a stray marker. In any case, the nonchalance with which he strolled away from the scene of the crime shows that even if his courage failed him, he may be sharing a screen with Cruise before long. Any thespian, after all, will tell you the first rule of acting: whatever happens, look as if it were intended.