A Blue Moon Dancing Over The City Of Manchester

By Adebayo Lamikanra 

As most football enthusiasts know, there are two Premier League clubs in the city of Manchester but one of them, Manchester City, has been so much in the shadow of the other, Manchester United, that most people are hardly aware of the existence of Manchester City. I have however been a Man. City supporter for 43 years having begun supporting the club in the wake of their second ever League championship win in 1968. This was my last year in the secondary school and being at home thoroughout 1969, I had the opportunity of seeing the highlights of most of their championship year games right here in Nigeria. In those pre-satellite years this was a unique opportunity to watch action from the English League and such was the excitement generated by City’s championship side that I became a City fan and have remained so ever since. Little did I know at that time that City’s next championship would not come for another 43 years! As far back as that time, United was by far the more famous of the two Manchester clubs and even as City won the championship that year, the shine was taken off their triumph by United’s victory in the European Champion’s Cup in the same year, within a couple of days of City winning the championship in fact. For some inexplicable reason, however, this did not matter to me, I was determined to ‘follow Citeh’, as City supporters were wont to chant as they cheered on their unlikely heroes.

The City side of 1968 was phenomenal, having only won promotion to the first division the year before. It was a side that was managed jointly by the canny but understated Joe Mercer and the bold and flamboyant Malcolm Allison, a Londoner who must have regarded Manchester as a place of exile. The two men complemented each other completely and their team played such sweet football that it appeared as if City had acquired a new lease of life and was now prepared to take its place alongside the most famous football clubs in the land. Unfortunately United was also in a golden age, painfully created as far as City supporters were concerned, by Matt Busby , a Scot who had been a City player. He had assembled a powerful squad of players known as the Busby Babes in the late fifties but their potential was never achieved as several of them died tragically in a plane crash in Munich airport on their way home from a European Cup match. This tragedy propelled Manchester United onto the front pages and generated a tremendous wave of sympathy which reached around the world and diverted attention to a team which had to be rebuilt by necessity. It is incredibly difficult to assemble an iconic squad of players such as the Busby Babes but Sir Matt Busby was going to build another great team in the space of a few years.

By 1968, when United won the European Cup with a team built around perhaps the most exciting trio of forwards in the history of English football, Charlton, Best and Law, who like Matt Busby was a Scot who had previously worn the sky blue shirt of Manchester City. City may not have been as glamorous as United but they had players like Colin Bell, Francis Lee and Mike Summerbee in their ranks and looked set to go places. Unfortunately they never arrived at the Promised land as the only trophy won by City, the League Cup, did not arrive in the trophy cabinet at Maine Road until 1976 which was, for 34 years the only major trophy won by City. Unlike at Old Trafford where Matt Busby presided over the team for many years, managers kept arriving at and departing from Maine Road in a steady stream, a situation which did not make for any consistency either in the team or the Boardroom even if Peter Swales was the club chairman for many years. In spite of the upheavals the club remained one of the powers of English football and were the first English club to pay what was then the huge sum of £1 million for a player when they secured what was to prove the grossly overpriced services of Michael Robinson in 1979, at a time when the mercurial Malcolm Allison had returned on the merry go round which was constantly bringing in and taking out managers. This and similar indiscretions proved too much for the club and by the mid-eighties, at a time when Alex Ferguson was settling in at Old Trafford in prelude to their glory years, City was heading in the other direction with relegation a possibility in every season until the club dropped out of the elite group entirely and started to mix it with teams like Peterborough, Rotherham and Doncaster in the basement of the English league, finally having to compete in the old third division from where they were promoted in 1994 after Paul Dickoff had scored in the 94th minute in a playoff to secure what until that moment was an unlikely promotion.

Being a City supporter was far from easy in those days, especially as United had embarked on their glory run which landed them 13 Premiership titles in less than 20 years and established the club at the pinnacle of English football. The club was able to attract star players from all over the world as many stars were keen to play in a team which appeared to have discovered the formula for winning practically every trophy on offer and their ground at Old Trafford became known as the Theatre of Dreams. All through those dreary years, however, support for City within the city of Manchester was as massive as it was unwavering and very few switched their allegiance to United even as that club hoovered an unending stream of trophies into their bulging trophy cabinet.

By the time I arrived in Manchester in 1973 to begin a postgraduate course at the University of Manchester, I had been a City supporter for four years. My heading to Manchester for my course was indeed not an accident as City rather than the impressive academic credentials of the University of Manchester was the first reason why I had applied for admission to the university. I had applied to both the University of Manchester and Strathclyde and when admission letters arrived from both institutions, I had no difficulty whatsoever in jumping at the chance to go over to Manchester as Strathclyde had only been an insurance cover for failure to be admitted by my first choice of institution.

By the time I got to Manchester, the glory days of the late sixties had become to fade, unperceptively, it must be said because most of the squad, including the ageing Dennis Law who had returned to City after his sojourn at Old Trafford, were internationals with Colin Bell, Francis Lee and later Dennis Tuert who arrived at City in 1974 being automatic choices for the England team whilst Willie Donache and Asa Hartford who arrived from West Bromwich in 1974 were permanent fixtures of the Scottish team. In those pre-Premiership days, watching the highest quality of football served up every Saturday in the old First division was dirt cheap as the most expensive seats outside the Directors’ box at Maine Road could be occupied for as little as £1! By the time I arrived in Manchester, my friend and former classmate at Igbobi College, Remi Olatunbosun, now a Professor of Engineering at Birmingham University, had been in Manchester for four years and was and is still a diehard United fan, and to welcome me to what had become his city, he took me to Old Trafford on my first Saturday in Manchester to watch, to my delight and complete satisfaction, Liverpool take apart a pathetic United side which was indeed relegated at the end of that season. That was my first and last visit to Old Trafford as Remi, not being a masochist, did not go to Old Trafford regularly that season and I began to haunt, in the way of a resident ghost, the hallowed precincts of Maine Road which was in those days, a fortress for City much as Etihad is now for the current team.

Following City has been a unique experience as the team took her devotees to dizzy heights and brought them down again without a break in between and I constantly wonder how we have been able to keep faith with the club. This is why all genuine City supporters have not been able to take  in all that has happened to the club since a massive and sustained injection of cash turned the club into one of the most powerful clubs in Europe and the world. This is why I was not able to watch the match against QPR in which a victory was all that was required to bring the championship to City for the first time in the Premiership era. The club’s history is so full of falls at the last unlikely hurdle that long term supporters like me did not believe deep down in our blue hearts that City was going to beat QPR as most pundits expected City to do comfortably. And as things turned out, we were almost uncomfortably correct when at the beginning of added time we needed to score two unlikely goals to pip our neighbours and bitter enemies by goal difference. Every City supporter must have given up hope long before Sergio (Kun) Aguero scored that 94th minute goal to send us into a state of wild ecstasy which took us many days to recover from. We have now turned a corner and it seems we are on the verge of a great awakening but honestly, we City fans cannot believe that we have truly arrived at the top and are prepared for a rude awakening. What our more successful neighbours will not understand is that if we went back to being the mid-table fodder which we have been for so many years, we who follow City would still be behind the team as we have always been.

 •Lamikanra wrote this piece for TheNEWS magazine.