Yes he certainly did - but Liverpool have always been their main rivals though...........
There's the thing.
To a lot (by no means all but an awful lot) of the glory-by-association, Freudian field cases that delight in banging on and on about their undying love for that club, Liverpool were (and possibly remain) their true rivals.
We were only an afterthought.
A slight bemusement to remind them of what they ever-so-definitely, absolutely weren't in any aspect of their lives, at all, good, no - failures.
So, as if to over--compensate for something else, they plummeted to the depths of their insecurities and conjured up that banner. A classic case of bullies jeering at the less fortunate so as to distract from their own pathetic experience.
That the club conspired with them spoke volumes about how that fragile mentality had inveigled its way throughout the organisation. It had become part of its DNA, you might say. It is instructive to those of us who are studying their reaction to their slow but, I think inevitable, demise, right now. Their mentality is no stronger in times of trial than in days of glory. They simply do not have the skill set to react appropriately.
As someone said earlier, be under no illusion that if we hadn't win the lottery that banner would still be up, today. Those sad, sad tossers would still be vicariously negotiating their unrequited existence by metaphorically pissing down on us whilst high-fiving their mirror image, that have latched onto and similarly distorted whatever was salvageable about the reds from down the M62.
We are what they aspire to be now. They hate that. Life is beautiful.