Blue Moon: Down Among The Dead Men With Manchester City Read online

  Two more goals secure the win and the tension dissipates amid the communal singing. We love you City, they declared, before coming over all swoonsome with ‘Blue Moon’, which is. sniff, sniff, the most beautiful, sentimental song ever written, ever, ever, boo-hoo. At the final whistle, the results from Division Two are announced to the crowd. They carry on talking, barely noticing. One supporter, hurrying down the aisle, stops abruptly. ‘Hey, this is our division, isn’t it?’ His mate nods. They both laugh.

  In the press room, the league tables flash up on the television screen. City are top, and everyone chuckles. The football had been frantic, the players gripped by a form of agoraphobia, a fear of running into space, of holding the ball for more than a second. Where there was once a poetry about Manchester City, a sweet rhythm that even ran to their names – Bell, Lee, Summerbee – their game is now as fluid, as pleasing on the ear and eye, as the choppy, stroppy prose of Tskhadadze, Tiatto and Dickov. Still, at least it is effective, as wins against Blackpool and at Notts County in the Worthington Cup on Tuesday testify.

  Give him a win, and Joe Royle is your genial Uncle Joe. A defeat, and he can barely lift his head. Hands in his pocket, smile in place, he was Uncle Joe on Saturday, chuffed as little mint balls. ‘We mustn’t get too excited,’ he said. Another smile. He was keeping his emotions in check, but his body language mocked the downbeat tone of his words. He shuffled from foot to foot, rolling his shoulders. ‘There’s a long way to go.’ Big grin. ‘We must carry on working hard.’ If City still top the league next May, we may find Uncle Joe issuing these paeans to prudence and modesty while tap-dancing on the tables, singing ‘Blue Moon’ even.

  • The scoreline flattered City. They did not play particularly well. Few players were comfortable on the ball and only their sheer strength of will carried them to victory. The supporters were relieved though – the result would resonate favourably in football circles and make City look the part. In their hearts, they were fearful. Blackpool, a solid but uninspiring Second Division team, had matched them for long periods of the game.

  Sunday, 16 August 1998

  The defeat at Fulham had sent City hurtling down the division and fans woke up to newspapers carrying the first published league tables of the new season. They were thirteenth, the lowest position in their history.

  Monday, 17 August 1998

  Fears over the severity of Tskhadadze’s injury were confirmed. He had torn the cruciate ligaments in his left knee. ‘I really feel for him. He was absolutely devastated after the match,’ said Royle. Despite several attempted comebacks, he did not play again for the rest of the season.

  Wednesday, 19 August 1998

  Manchester City 7 Notts County 1

  (Worthington Cup First Round, Second Leg)

  Gary Mason opened the scoring before Paul Dickov celebrated the second anniversary of his arrival at Maine Road by scoring twice and laying on two more. The other scorers were Shaun Goater (two), Lee Bradbury and Jim Whitley. Mason’s mother, Liz, had put £1 on him to score the first goal at 20–1.

  Sam Allardyce, County’s manager, described his team’s performance as a ‘joke’. Joe Royle enthused, ‘The fans have not seen a result like this in years. It’s been a long time coming and I hope they enjoyed it.’

  Thursday 20, August 1998

  David Bernstein formally opened the club’s new indoor leisure centre, The Dome. The £2.2 million centre, housed at their Platt Lane training complex, was a joint venture between the club, Manchester City Council and the English Sports Council. It included an artificial football pitch, hockey pitch, a sports injury clinic and solarium.

  STORY OF FOOTBALL’S MOST FAMOUS FAILURE

  (The Times, Saturday, 22 August 1998)

  Our man in a Panama is looking good. The sun is out, the shorts are on, and the garden is quite magnificent. ‘The bloke from the local golf club does it for us,’ explains Fred Eyre. And a good job he does too: lush rolling lawn, neat borders, majestic conifers, an apple tree in radiant blossom, fruit everywhere.

  Fred. The name suits him. Unassuming, to-the-point, anachronistic. This is football’s most famous loser, outside his huge house, with electric gates and a drive as long as a motorway slip-road. Where did it all go right, Fred? ‘Aw, don’t go on too much about the money and all that,’ he pleads.

  The opulence that surrounds him is like snow that has fallen overnight. He sits among it, unaffected. We could be sitting at a bus stop, or back in the council house where he was brought up in north Manchester. His eyes are covered by toffee-coloured shades, but there is no doubt that, beneath them, they meet yours square on. No messing.

  The honesty he personifies has had much to do with his success as an author. His first, and most celebrated book, Kicked into Touch, was a bulletin from the largely unseen, unsweetened side of football. Eyre wrote of free transfers, midfield grafters, high hopes and high tackles, scrappers and cloggers. Injuries were treated with a sharp slap on the affected area and trainers (‘Coaches were what we travelled to games on.’) tucked their jeans in their socks, their forefinger in your ribs.

  Among the broken promises and broken hearts, Eyre found humour and related it with remarkable candidness. It wasn’t Steinbeck or Conrad but, then again, unlike him they hadn’t played for Wigan Athletic or Lincoln City. ‘I didn’t sweat blood at three in the morning writing the books. It was so easy, it just came natural to me. I’ve got a good memory, and I’m not bad at telling a story,’ he said.

  Eyre was the footballer of which we rarely hear. He was a not-quite-made-it, someone else in the team, a ‘trier’ as he was described in the pen pictures of one match programme. Back in 1981, when Kicked into Touch was published, he had played for 20 clubs in 20 years, under the supervision of 29 managers. Since then, the nomadic lifestyle has continued. Most recently he was chief scout at Sheffield United.

  Paradoxically, he was an outstanding schoolboy footballer, and was one of about 1,000 boys asked by Manchester City to attend a series of trials. Only two were invited to join the club and at 15 Eyre signed for his beloved City. ‘I went to my first game at Maine Road when I was three years old. Our right-back had a bandage on his knee and I asked my dad what it was for. He told me it was to stop his leg falling off!’

  He joined as a ground staff boy but, along with a handful of other young players, he became an apprentice professional when the scheme was introduced in the 1950s. By virtue of his surname beginning with ‘E’, he was the first to receive an apprentice’s contract. ‘I was the first, and no one can say any different, not that anyone but me gives a damn,’ he said.

  His City career was stymied just four years later on a spring afternoon in Manchester. City’s A team was drawing 1–1 with Bury when Eyre volunteered a leg to a loose ball in the centre circle. He met a defender at the wrong end of a one-way street tackle and the ligaments in his knee twanged like a ‘guitar instrumental’ (to use his own words). A few weeks later, he was given a free transfer. He had expected as much, not merely because of the injury, but also because, quite simply, he was not good enough.

  Thereafter he eked out a living from football, while simultaneously setting up his own stationery business which expanded at an inverse rate to his sporting efforts. At the age of 37, he decided to log his experiences of football’s underworld. ‘I was living in a nice house with a nice business, a lovely wife; the world was rosy. I knew I was writing from a position of strength. I had worked hard at my football but it never quite took off. The luck was with me on the business side, it was as simple as that.’

  He co-funded his book and it quickly became a success with constant reprints. He was the footballer we might all have been – all heart, effort and honesty, but without the requisite skill. The eye for detail and the ability to relate it succinctly, however, was with him at all times – in the dressing rooms, on the team coaches. He took us there and populated his books with characters that tackled hard but (usually) fair. Shining through each of them was the absol
ute love of football, this beautifully cruel game.

  He has written five books and is unsure of how many they have sold, though he accepts 250,000 would be a fair estimate. It has galvanised a career for him as an after-dinner speaker. Where he once struggled to control a bouncing ball, he is now the master of the anecdote, a Johan Cruyff of the sprightly tale.

  Surprisingly, despite his expansive knowledge of the game and his renowned business acumen, he has never returned to Maine Road in an official capacity. ‘I’ve been dismayed at what has happened there. I thought Franny Lee would be absolutely fantastic for the job. I was amazed when it went even worse under him. It proves what a big job it must be to turn the club around,’ he said.

  It is not difficult to surmise that Eyre’s pragmatism might not sit comfortably within the hush-hush communality of a football club. He is too much of his own man. Anyway, he has a garden to watch over, a business to run, jokes to tell, a hat to wear.

  Saturday, 22 August 1998

  Manchester City 0 Wrexham 0

  The first ever league meeting between these two clubs was dubbed by one newspaper as a ‘0–0 massacre’. A combination of poor finishing and inspired goalkeeping by Wrexham’s Mark Cartwright frustrated City. Joe Royle reassured the fans: ‘It’s a long season so there is no reason to panic. A lot of teams will come here and play as though they are in a cup final.’

  The attendance, the fifth highest of the day at 27,677, was larger than at Upton Park where West Ham United played host to Manchester United.

  Tuesday, 25 August 1998

  A group of City fans from Cheadle hired a mini-bus and parked it outside Maine Road for the evening while they toasted the ground’s 75th anniversary. After downing a few cans, they sang ‘Happy Birthday’ in the general direction of the famous stadium.

  Meanwhile, winger Martin Phillips became the 22nd player to leave City since Joe Royle’s arrival. His £100,000 move to Portsmouth saw him reunited with Alan Ball. He cost City £500,000 in November 1995 and made just three full first-team appearances. Ball had predicted he would become ‘Britain’s first £10 million footballer.’

  LAKE FINDS NEW HORIZONS

  (The Times, Saturday, 29 August 1998)

  Throw us the ball back, mister. And when he does, we are all 12 years old again, worried about nothing much, apart from being home late for tea or slicing a shot into the porch window.

  A ball at our feet, and there is joy in our hearts, a boy in our shoes. Imagine, then, possessing an abundance of skill. You’re the best player in your neighbourhood, the best in town. The game becomes your livelihood. At 18, playing for your home-town club, you are feted, everyone knows your name. It is spoken reverentially and already has a stately ring to it, the rhythm of a legend-to-be: Paul Lake.

  Imagine, then, that all this is taken away, slowly, painfully, irredeemably, and at the age of 21 you are left shipwrecked on dreams, made old before your time, limping when you should be dancing.

  Paul Lake played 125 league and cup games for Manchester City between 1987 and 1992. He was an England Under-21 international and a member of the initial squad for Italia ’90. Tall, broad-shouldered, he was both strong and skilful. He read the game well, two moves ahead of most opponents, two yards quicker. ‘He was our Duncan Edwards,’ say City supporters. This is shorthand for a player of great talent and dignity, a maturity beyond his years and, also, an unfulfilled potential.

  History has it that Lake’s career ended in September 1990 when he twisted his right knee in a game against Aston Villa and heard ‘a kind of crunch’. ‘You’ll be playing again in a week,’ said his surgeon. The ‘week’, in fact, equated to the rest of Paul Lake’s life.

  The knee, though Lake refused to accept it at the time, had been seriously damaged 18 months earlier. City were playing Bradford City when Lake galloped forward and, side-stepping tackles, tore down on goal. At the end of his heedless, youthful charge was Mick Kennedy, Bradford’s then record signing – bought, according to the match programme, to ‘stiffen’ the side.

  The challenge left Lake with ligament damage. It was the beginning of the end. ‘I was pushed back into playing just four months after surgery. The job was not done properly, the underlying problem of the cruciate ligament was not addressed,’ he said.

  The injury was exacerbated against Villa when Lake ruptured the cruciate ligament further. Thereafter, he joined the shadowland of the injured sportsman, cut off from the pack, alone among his own kind, a hospital appointment where there was once a training session, hope where there was once a guarantee. The injured are slapped on the back, encouraged, but they remain in purgatory, haunted by themselves. ‘You get obsessed with your injury,’ explained Lake. ‘It takes over your whole life. From waking in the morning, you are flexing the affected area, tensing up, kidding yourself that you are getting better.’

  Lake did not get better. He made several abortive comebacks but the knee was ‘a bag of bolts’. Finally, in January 1996, he retired from the game. At this point, he was losing 18–1: 18 operations to one full first-team appearance in the six years since sustaining the injury. Surgeons were talking of completely replacing the knee, and still are.

  ‘I sometimes take my 10-month-old son in the back garden and we play around with a plastic football. That’s about as exacting as my football gets these days,’ he said. Lake is an honest man, and what he has lost in the pleasure of playing the game, he has perhaps gained in sensitivity and wisdom. ‘I’ve had some bad times, seriously bad times. I was so depressed I had to see a counsellor once or twice.’ Most footballers would not make such an admission; was this information off the record? ‘No, it’s what happened. It’s a hell of a thing to come to terms with. Football was the focal point of my life and I was playing for City, my team, the team I have always supported.’

  City granted him a testimonial against Manchester United last October. His son, Zachary, was born on the same day. Lake took the ceremonial kick-off in front of nearly 25,000 supporters at Maine Road, a remarkable turn-out for a player who had not played regular first-team football for over seven years. The memory had clearly lingered.

  He wore a knee-brace on the day to avoid aggravating the injury or causing it to lock as he jogged on to the pitch. Afterwards he overheard a comment to the effect that it was a good idea since it garnered him even more sympathy. He shakes his head at the callousness of this remark and can recall, if pushed, similar examples of crass thoughtlessness. ‘It’s not all bad though,’ he laughed suddenly. ‘I met some really funny people in football, some great people. I’d say the ratio is about 80/20 in favour of good people.’

  Appropriately, he is now training to become a chartered sports physiotherapist. He has been there, suffered it, and wants to help others. ‘It’s not the same as playing, but it really pleases me to help other lads back to fitness,’ he said. He has parted company with City to complete his university studies. ‘City was too much of a security blanket for me. I want to achieve something in my own right,’ he explained.

  While he looks to the future, he is a man finally coming to terms with his past. ‘All right, my career ended very early, but I did something thousands dreamed of. I sometimes think back to what it was like in the dressing-room before a match. I’d put on my City shirt, smear the Vaseline on my eyebrows, look into the mirror . . .’ The words tail off. You are with him, among the shin pads and liniment, for ever 12 years old, and up for the cup.

  Saturday, 29 August 1998

  Notts County 1 Manchester City 1

  A goal in injury time by Shaun Goater earned City a point after Notts County had taken the lead from the penalty spot when Kevin Horlock was judged to have handled the ball.

  Jamie Pollock was dismissed for dissent after telling referee Terry Heilbron that giving the penalty was ‘an absolute holocaust of a decision.’ City were in fourteenth position.

  Two

  The Heart of Darkness

  Tuesday, 1 September 1998

  After
just six senior appearances, 18-year-old midfielder Gary Mason won a call-up to the Scotland Under-21 squad for their European Under-21 Championship match in Lithuania. He had been recommended by Willie Donachie, himself a former Scotland international with 35 caps.

  Mason’s elevation was remarkable. During the previous season he had barely made the club’s reserve team, playing just two matches. It was a typical example of a footballer being in favour with a particular manager. Similarly, Nicky Weaver had been the club’s third-choice goalkeeper during Frank Clark’s regime.

  Wednesday, 2 September 1998

  Manchester City Council announced it would build a £90 million stadium to house the Commonwealth Games of 2002. The stadium would be financed by a £77 million lottery grant and the remainder supplied by the city council. Situated a mile from the city centre, it would be built in two phases, with 21,000 covered seats for the Games, rising to 48,000 to accommodate football matches. City, subject to approval from shareholders and supporters, would be invited to take over the stadium as their new home in time for the 2003–04 season.

  Wednesday, 2 September 1998

  Manchester City 3 Walsall 1

  Goals from Shaun Goater (two) and Paul Dickov sealed a comfortable victory. Andy Rammell hit a late consolation goal for Walsall. City climbed six places to eighth – seven points behind leaders Stoke City.

  CITY FORTUNES LACK RHYME AND REASON

  (The Times, Saturday, 5 September 1998)

  First World War soldiers had the poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon at their side, men able to proffer words of compassion and empathy among the monstrous anger of the guns.

  Manchester City supporters, who know plenty about dodging flak, have turned to a famous Scottish bard in their darkest hour. Rabbie Burns, no less, is quoted in the latest issue of the City fanzine, King of the Kippax: ‘To see her is to love her, and love her forever. For nature made her what she is, and will support her evermore.’ The line with the most resonance and relevance is: ‘For nature made her what she is.’ Nature, damn it, made City capricious, foolhardy, a club that stares at the stars but crashes into a lamp-post, ouch, while its gaze is averted.