Rich Caught Beneath the Landslide

Manchester City in the 1990s
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-909245-80-8
Verlag: deCoubertin Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

In the year when Manchester City, managed by Pep Guardiola, swept its way to the Premier League title, Caught Beneath the Landslide examines another, very different club, also called Manchester City. This is the Manchester City of Maine Road, of Moss Side, when the music was by Oasis and the football by Georgi Kinkladze and Uwe Rosler. It is the story of club that plunged through two divisions and then clambered back up again. It is the story of a club before the Abu Dhabi takeover, when Manchester City was run, not by a sheikh, but by men like Peter Swales and Francis Lee who ran the gauntlet of supporters anger as season after season ran out of control. Caught Beneath the Landslide interviews managers, fans, players and those, like the residents of Moss Side, who lived in the clubs shadow. It opens in 1989 with the 5-1 victory in the Manchester derby that propelled Alex Ferguson to the very brink of dismissal and ends with the demolition of Maine Road and the move to what would become the Etihad Stadium. In the words of Uwe Rosler: 'It was a different club, a working-class club supported by the people of Manchester.'

Tim Rich, who wrote the book, has covered football in Manchester for almost twenty years. He has previously collaborated on the autobiographies of Ron Atkinson and Andrei Kanchelskis.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rich, Tim

Leseproben

Journey’s End

‘I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU DON’T KNOW WHO ROBBIE FOWLER AND Steve McManaman are.’

A father is holding court, trying to tell his young family a story. ‘They played for Liverpool but they also played for us. For City.

‘I met them once. They were in a coffee shop in Manchester. I went over to Robbie and told him, “You tried really hard for us, you scored some great goals.” He nodded and by then Steve McManaman had come back with the coffees. He looked at me and I said, “Steve, you were shite.”’

There is laughter, although the daughter looks quizzical, probably still wondering who Robbie Fowler and Steve McManaman are. The family get on with their pre-match meal.

There is less than an hour until Manchester City’s final home game of the 2017/18 season begins. The 93:20 lounge in the Etihad Stadium is not especially busy. The match, against Brighton, has little riding on it. Manchester City won the title with five games to spare. They have been near-certainties to win the championship since they beat Manchester United at Old Trafford in December.

The matchday experience at the Etihad Stadium has a slick, American feel to it. There are table-tennis tables, penalty shootout competitions for the kids. Your ticket is presented to you in a wallet, the stewards smile and say they hope you enjoy the match.

Uwe Rösler and Paul Walsh, one of Manchester City’s more formidable strike partnerships of the 1990s, are conducting a talk-in on a stage by the club shop. With his long grey hair, high cheekbones and tortoiseshell glasses, Walsh has the air of an ageing rock star – think Bill Nighy in Love Actually.

The Tunnel Club, with its £7,500 membership fee that allows you to watch the players warming up in the tunnel after a five-course meal, may have been derided as the last word in corporate excess, but a version of it has been included in the specifications for Tottenham’s redeveloped stadium.

After the match, in the queue for the tram back to Manchester, you hear foreign languages spoken in a young, racially-mixed crowd. And yet there are hints of a distant past, from even before Robbie Fowler and Steve McManaman played for Manchester City.

There is the old blue-and-white scarf with the dark red stripe, the replica shirt sponsored by Brother, another by Saab. Beneath a jacket a T-shirt peeks out with a picture of the old Kippax Stand bearing the slogan: ‘We’re Not Really Here’. Someone is carrying an inflatable banana. Behind my padded, premium seat are the words: ‘Paul Lake 1987-1992’, as if he were a casualty of war, which in a sense he was. The past is here, shimmering just below the surface.

The 93:20 lounge commemorates a final day of the season when everything mattered. It was May 2012. There were shades of the last time Manchester City had won the title, in 1968. Then, as now, City had to match United’s result to become champions. Then as now, one of the clubs had finished their season in the North East. In 2012 Manchester United were at Sunderland. In 1968 Manchester City had been at St James’ Park.

On the day of the match, Roberto Mancini, the Manchester City manager, had visited the chapel of St Bede’s College, an independent Catholic school where the club educates its academy students. He had knelt and prayed. When he arrived at the Hilton Hotel to brief the team there was hardly a word spoken – not one member of the squad asked a question. Usually, there would be a few queries about what Mancini actually meant. There would be some banter.

Once in the dressing room, Mancini said barely a word, or at least nothing that anyone remembers. There was no attempt to make a great speech as Alex Ferguson had done during the interval of the Champions League final against Bayern Munich: ‘If you lose, you will pass within six inches of that cup and you won’t be able to touch it.’ Gary Neville’s response when reminded of his manager’s oratory is to reply that Manchester United played even worse in the second half.

Both matches were snatched from the brink by two goals in stoppage time and Sergio Aguero’s, the one that came after 93 minutes and 20 seconds against Queens Park Rangers, is commemorated along with Martin Tyler’s commentary on Sky Sports. It was the making of the modern Manchester City.

You could say the same of the man who is saying goodbye to Manchester on a damp, cool May evening. When Yaya Touré arrived from Barcelona in July 2010, Manchester City had not won a significant trophy in 34 years. At Old Trafford, there was a banner on the Stretford End designed to look like the mileage counter on a car dashboard. It ticked over every year that Manchester City finished without silverware. It did not reappear for the 2011/12 season. Six years later, to quote Touré’s own words, Manchester United had been ‘put into the shadows’.

Every time Touré comes anywhere near the Brighton goal there are screeches of ‘shoot’ but though there are some fine touches there is not a repeat of the goal against Manchester United in the FA Cup semi-final that saw him muscle his way past Nemanja Vidic and slide the ball through Edwin van der Sar’s legs. With enormous sentimentality, he is announced as man of the match even though the night has belonged to the quick mind and dazzling feet of Leroy Sane.

After the 3-1 win over Brighton saw Manchester City equal the record for the number of top-flight victories in a single season, set by Tottenham in the glory, glory season of 1960/61, Touré gave a long, meandering interview on the pitch. It was self-indulgent, but it was a better way to say goodbye than some of Manchester City’s other greats had been given.

Neil Young, the man who, like Touré, had scored the winner in an FA Cup final, was refused a testimonial and shunted off to Preston North End. You think of Francis Lee scoring for Derby on his return to Maine Road, punching the air, yelling at Peter Swales, the man who sold him and then tried to squeeze a bit more out of the deal: ‘You can stick that up your fucking jumper.’

There had been times when the relationship between Touré and Manchester City had threatened to snap. In 2014 his agent, Dimitry Seluk, commented that Touré was considering his future at the Etihad Stadium because ‘nobody had wished him a happy birthday’.

Seluk commented that Roberto Carlos had been given a Bugatti Veyron by Suleyman Kerimov, the billionaire owner of Anzhi Makhachkala, the club in faraway, strife-torn Dagestan that was then trying to buy its way to the Russian Premier League title. ‘Yaya only got a cake’.

There were many who wondered what Touré was doing with Dimitry Seluk, why he seemed to go along with everything his agent said. To understand, you had to realise they met when Touré found himself transferred to Metalurh Donetsk, a little club deep in Ukraine’s coal belt, which Seluk ran as his fiefdom.

Seluk took over Touré’s business deals. His subsequent transfers were to Olympiakos, Monaco, Barcelona and Manchester City. When the Ukrainian civil war saw Donetsk under artillery fire, Metalurh, like Shakhtar, fled the besieged city for Kiev. Shakhtar survived, little Metalurh went bankrupt. When he was asked for the best birthday present he had ever given Yaya Touré, Seluk replied: ‘His career.’

He is royalty now. When Touré, microphone in hand, says his goodbyes, he mentions Sir Alex Ferguson, recovering from a brain haemorrhage at Salford Royal Hospital, which brings applause, a sign of the crowd’s generosity towards its bitterest opponent.

When he is asked afterwards to recall his best moment in a sky-blue shirt, Touré mentions the winner in the FA Cup semi-final against Manchester United which is greeted by a vast, rolling cheer. A mention of Sheikh Mansour also brings applause in a way that it would not have done for Swales, Lee or David Bernstein. Above me is a banner that reads: ‘Manchester Thanks You, Sheikh Mansour’. Except as a piece of extreme irony, Maine Road could never have sported the slogan: ‘Manchester Thanks You, Peter Swales’.

A few weeks after all the applause, after he had been given a season ticket for life, Touré gave an interview to France Football. He was pitiless in his assessment of Pep Guardiola, a man he claimed had never understood African footballers, either at Barcelona or Manchester City. It was in the same spirit of Francis Lee’s gesture to Swales. Though so much had changed, this was typical City.

The team had taken its leave of the Etihad Stadium to the sound of ‘Heroes’ by David Bowie. The swaggering rhythm, driven forward by Robert Fripp’s guitar, has always attracted those who stage sports events. They have never, presumably, examined the lyrics which in Bowie’s words spoke of ‘a yearning for a future we all knew would never come to pass’.

From the grandiose opening, ‘I will be king and you, you will be queen,’ ‘Heroes’ climaxes with ‘Nothing will keep us together. We could steal time, just for one day.’ The title is in quotation marks for a reason.

It is a song of deep, doomed, hopeless love and as such it deserved to be the battle hymn of another club that existed in 1977, the year of its release. It was a grittier,...