CAUGHT BENEATH
THE LANDSLIDE
MANCHESTER CITY IN THE 1990s
CAUGHT BENEATH
THE LANDSLIDE
MANCHESTER CITY IN THE 1990s
First published as a hardback by deCoubertin Books Ltd in 2018
First Edition
deCoubertin Books, 46B Jamaica Street, Liverpool. L1 0AF
www.decoubertin.co.uk
eISBN: 978-1-909245-80-8
Copyright © Tim Rich, 2018
The right of Tim Rich to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover design by Thomas Regan/Milkyone. Typeset by Leslie Priestley.
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To Sally,
who entered a football press box
long before I did.
This is the story of a football club.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Journey’s End
Another Time, Another Place
PJ
The Lost Boys
A Marriage of Convenience
Peter
The Storming of the Winter Palace
Moss Side Story
Under the Volcano
The Germans
We Have all the Time in the World
George
The Year of the Four Managers
The Legends Depart
Downfall
Postcards from the Edge
Resurrection Men
Commonwealth
What Becomes of You My Love?
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Illustrations
List of Illustrations
Manchester City 5, Manchester United 1, 23 September 1989. (Mirrorpix)
Peter Swales, the Cincinnati Kid. (Getty)
Big Malcolm Allison wore a big coat and a big smile and a blew a big budget. (Offside)
John Bond with another outrageous signing, this one Trevor Francis. (Getty)
Billy McNeill was known as Cesar at Celtic where he played nearly 800 games. He lasted three seasons at City and by the end, supporters at Maine Road were calling him less flattering names. (Offside)
The local left back Andy Hinchcliffe (Getty)
Paul Lake, one of the brightest talents Manchester City has ever known. (Getty)
Maine Road and Moss Side in the mid-1990s on a match day. (Offside)
Peter Reid managing and Peter Reid playing. (Getty)
A new penny-pinching initiative at City, with Niall Quinn ironing his own match-shirt? (Getty)
Brian Horton (right) with Tony Book (left), or as Noel Gallagher would call Horton: “Not cool.” (Offside)
The much-criticised Nicky Summerbee brought tumbling down by United’s Denis Irwin. (Offside)
Garry Flitcroft, the City supporter who was sold to Blackburn Rovers. (Getty)
Alan Ball with the Germans, Uwe Rosler, Michael Frontceck and Eike Immel. (Getty)
The genius that is Giorgi Kinkladze taking Sheffield Wednesday’s Mark Pembridge this way and that. (Getty)
He did not hang around, Steve Coppell. (Getty)
Neither did Phil Neal. (Getty)
Frank Clark brought with him some optimism but he would go the same way as his predecessors. (Getty)
The day at Stoke when City and Joe Royle tumbled into the Second Division. (Mirrorpix)
Tony Book and Colin Bell in happier times as players before the fire and fury under Francis Lee. (Getty)
Great player. Crap chairman? Francis Lee. (Getty)
Dennis Tueart another legend turned administrator would divide opinion upon his return to City. (Getty)
Ian Brightwell not mucking about with Eric Cantona. (Getty)
Ian Bishop scoring on his return to Maine Road after a decade away as City return to the Premier League. (Getty)
The last Manchester derby at Maine Road in 2002: Manchester City 3, Manchester United 1. (Offside)
New ground. New players. New aspirations. Yaya Toure leaves the new City. (Getty)
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 Vidić 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, earthier club than the one that is parading the league championship now. It lived more dangerously. It was also called Manchester City.
Another Time, Another Place
THE WOMAN PUSHED OPEN THE DOOR AND SAW HER HUSBAND lying flat out on the bed, a pillow over his head. It was a late September evening, daylight was still filtering through the leaded windows in the couple’s mock-Tudor house.
‘What’s wrong?’ said the woman. ‘What was the score?’
‘We got beaten 5-1,’ her husband replied.
‘Oh Jesus, I can’t believe it.’
Cathy Ferguson always said football took itself too seriously: ‘It’s such a silly game,’ was one of her pet expressions. This was different. This was the end.
A few miles from the house they called Fairfields, after the Clydeside shipyard where Alex Ferguson’s father once worked, United had been annihilated in the Manchester derby.
Ferguson thought it the worst performance of his managerial career. It was Manchester City’s biggest derby victory since they had beaten United 5-0 at Old Trafford in February 1955, a match remembered as Don Revie’s finest in a sky-blue shirt.
That was 34 years before and then the Manchester Guardian’s headline had been gentle: ‘Manchester City in Form’. The headlines now would be damning.
In the away dressing room at Maine Road, a place of light wood panelling and a blue linoleum floor, Ferguson’s players had waited for their manager.
Gary Pallister, then the most expensive footballer in England, braced himself. Ferguson had a habit of picking out only certain players for the invective that came to be called ‘The Hairdryer’ and Pallister was to become one of the regulars on the receiving end of it. Against a Manchester City side that contained half-a-dozen youth-team products, he had performed dreadfully.
However, when Ferguson tried to speak almost nothing came out of his mouth. Pallister thought he seemed shell shocked. He left without saying anything coherent. Upstairs, in the cramped press room, he gathered his thoughts and became more articulate. Trying to control the game, he said, had been ‘like trying to climb a glass mountain’.
As he nursed the Mercedes home towards Wilmslow, towards Fairfields, Ferguson would have known how close he now was to the edge. In six weeks or so, he would celebrate, if celebrate was the word, his third anniversary at Old Trafford.
He had spent plenty of the club’s money - £2.3m on Pallister, £1.2m on Paul Ince, another million on Neil Webb – at a time when Manchester United was valued at £10m. He had inherited a stylish, entertaining, if brittle, side from Ron Atkinson and created a galumphing mess.
The men who had hired him, Martin Edwards and Bobby Charlton, were leaving. The man the press referred to as Manchester United’s new owner, Michael Knighton, had witnessed the humiliation from the directors’ box at Maine Road and had been photographed ostentatiously brandishing his mobile phone. The speculation was that he would use it to call Howard Kendall, who had won two championships with Everton and who was nearing the end of a two-year sojourn in Spain with Athletic Bilbao.
Some seven hours before Cathy Ferguson saw her husband, Paul Lake had been driving towards Maine Road. He was twenty years old, one of the brightest talents Manchester City had known. He pulled up at some traffic lights in Longsight.
‘And stood there at the adjacent bus stop is a City fan in his thirties with his arm around his young son, both of them kitted out in replica shirts and the old-style blue, red and white scarves.
‘Having clocked me sitting there in my car, this fella nudges his lad and then does something that will stay with me forever,’ Lake recalled. ‘Pressing his palms together as if in prayer, he looks at me beseechingly and simply mouths, “Please, please.”’
Their prayers were soon answered more fully than the pair on the corner of Stockport Road could have dreamed of.
Lake’s manager was Mel Machin. He was 44, two years younger than Ferguson, but considerably less charismatic. Because he had been brought in from Norwich, the City fanzine Blueprint called him ‘Farmer Mel’. Two months later, his chairman, Peter Swales, would sack Machin, essentially for being too dull. In Swales’ famous malapropism Machin had ‘lacked a repartee with the crowd’. He meant ‘rapport’, Machin was not an end-of-pier comedian, although in the decade that followed there would be plenty of jokes at Manchester City’s expense.
Before the derby, the home dressing room was becoming agitated. The return to Division One had not gone well. The first four games had produced just one point. They had then overcome Queens Park Rangers 1-0, but two matches in London had seen them beaten by Wimbledon and by Brentford in the League Cup. When an apprentice walked into the dressing room wearing a red tie, Lake yelled at him to take it off.
The core of the team was made up of the lads who had won the 1986 FA Youth Cup – Paul Lake, David White, Ian Brightwell, Steve Redmond and Andy Hinchcliffe. On their path to glory they had beaten an Arsenal side containing Paul Merson and Michael Thomas in the semi-final, and had dominated Manchester United in the second leg of the final at Maine Road in front of 18,000.
Lake’s bonus for the entire cup run amounted to £56. He spent it on a pair of Arthur Ashe trainers, volume eight of Now That’s What I Call Music and a Terry’s Chocolate Orange for his parents.
Tony Book, the man who had managed them that night, now moved around the dressing room, shaking the hands of his boys and offering them encouragement. Everyone called him ‘Skip’.
He had been brought up as a bricklayer in Somerset but the dressing room at Maine Road was his spiritual home. He was thirty and had already been given a carriage clock by Bath City when Malcolm Allison persuaded Joe Mercer to bring him to Manchester on the grounds that Mercer’s own playing career at Arsenal had flourished after he left Goodison Park for Highbury at precisely Book’s age.
Book had gone on to lift all the heavy silverware of the Mercer-Allison glory years. It was a photograph of Tony Book, sitting on Mike Doyle’s shoulders and holding aloft the 1969 FA Cup, that dominated the players’ lounge at Maine Road.
He had managed as well as captained Manchester City, taken them to the League Cup, which until the takeover by the men from Abu Dhabi would be the club’s last major trophy. The following year, 1977, had seen him take City to second place in the league. Now it was his voice, rather than Machin’s, they could hear calling for calm as United began to dominate the game as most expected they would.
There was a disturbance in the North Stand that had been infiltrated by United supporters. It was five months after the slaughter at Hillsborough and yet Maine Road still had steel fences topped with barbed wire. United fans spilled over them and on to the pitch. The referee, Neil Midgley, stopped the game, which upon the restart changed completely.
City’s attacking was as ruthless and glorious as United’s defending was inept. Pallister slipped for the first and was dispossessed by David Oldfield for the third. In between, Trevor Morley extended his leg to stab home the second. When Oldfield’s cross cleared Paul Ince and was headed home by Ian Bishop for his first goal for Manchester City, it was a question of how many? The answer was five.
After Mark Hughes’ muscled, tree-trunk legs had swung into a bicycle kick and sent Russell Beardsmore’s cross clattering in from the underside of the post to give United the hope that something might be salvaged amid the wreckage, Lake ran through an ocean of space to set up Oldfield for a tap-in.
It is the fifth that everyone who was there recalls. Five goals was incontrovertible evidence of a rout. It might not have been called the ‘Maine Road Massacre’ if it had been 4-1. It was recalled because the scorer was so unlikely. ‘Where did Hinchcliffe come from? He’s the left-back remember,’ spluttered Clive Tyldesley from the commentary positions as he ran at full pace to head White’s cross home.
It is also remembered because it was such a beautifully constructed goal; ‘as good as Jim Leighton has ever been beaten by’, to quote the commentary once more. White allowed a long, beautifully-measured ball from Bishop to bounce twice before launching it precisely for Hinchcliffe to head in.
In 1989, the AC Milan of Gullit, Maldini, Rijkaard and Van Basten was considered the ultimate in world football, but this was as good anything seen at San Siro; a counter-attack launched and finished off in seconds. It was made and scored by White and Hinchcliffe, from Urmston and Hulme, talents the club had fashioned itself.
Twenty years later, before another Manchester derby, they held a reunion dinner for the men who had fired the bullets in the Maine Road Massacre. ‘We were a team of lads who had played together since the age of eleven,’ said Hinchcliffe.
‘We simply played that day as though it were an under-12 game. Everything just clicked for us. I was just twenty but the goal I scored that day was something I never bettered in my career.
‘We were such a young team; we didn’t realise the significance of the result. Manchester was becoming a vibrant city at that time with the Madchester scene but I was always low key. I was married at twenty and wasn’t the type to go out celebrating. I don’t know if we did anything or not.’ David White’s father did at least buy every Sunday newspaper he could lay his hands on.
The day after the reunion, the two sides of Manchester met again in a September derby. Twenty years on, Ferguson still ruled Old Trafford. In 1989 he had been their manager, clinging on, expecting the end. Now he was emperor. Eighteen days after he had buried his head beneath the pillow, Michael Knighton’s accountants had signalled their unease. He did not have the £20m required to take over Manchester United, so the bid faded as quickly as it had appeared. Charlton turned on Edwards, whom he accused of deceiving the board, and proposed himself as chairman.
Gradually, differences were plastered over, the cracks were sealed and, amid it all, Ferguson survived. In July 2009, Ferguson was more concerned with Manchester City than he had been in twenty years.
In a hotel suite in Kuala Lumpur, in the middle of one of the vast Asian tours Manchester United employed to ‘promote the brand’, Ferguson could not contain himself.
He had seen the ‘Welcome to Manchester’ poster on Deansgate, the city’s main thoroughfare, that showed Carlos Tevez, arms outstretched, in the blue of Manchester City. They had paid £47m to buy out his contract and take the Argentine from Old Trafford. It was a show of new-found strength that the club’s owners were prepared to flaunt.
‘It’s City isn’t it?’ Ferguson told the half-dozen journalists, sitting in an expensive, if nondescript, room full of brushed beige sofas. ‘They are a small club with a small mentality. All they can talk about is Manchester United, they can’t get away from it. That arrogance will be rewarded. It’s a go at us, that’s the one thing it is. They think taking Carlos Tevez away from Manchester United is a triumph. It is poor stuff.’
It was a rule of Ferguson’s managerial career that he reserved his invective for those clubs who could jeopardise Manchester United’s pre-eminence. When, in his later years at Arsenal, Arsène Wenger was asked why Ferguson was now so supportive of him, he smiled and said, ‘Because I am no longer a threat.’
Manchester City were a threat, and a growing one. At Old Trafford, where they had lost just one derby since the April afternoon in 1974 when Denis Law’s backheel helped them on their way to relegation, United snatched a 4-3 victory. It was sealed by one of only two interventions Michael Owen would make to justify his transfer from Newcastle, the other was a hat-trick in a Champions League fixture in Wolfsburg.
Ferguson, seeing Manchester City’s head of communications in the tunnel, gave Vicky Kloss a mouthful of invective about ‘Welcome to Manchester’. However, for Manchester City this 4-3 defeat had more resonance than the 5-1 annihilation twenty Septembers before. It showed that they were gaining on the club that had dominated English football for a generation. Two years later, Roberto Mancini’s side would go to Old Trafford and thrash them 6-1. They would win the title that season from United on goal difference.
The Massacre of Maine Road was a cul-de-sac. ‘I feel slightly embarrassed about the hype and frenzy that continues to surround the famous 5-1,’ wrote David White in his autobiography, Shades of Blue. ‘For me, this result represented one solitary victory in an era when Manchester United’s side was far superior to ours and regularly turned us over.
‘They always seemed to have the upper hand, sadly, and never once during my senior career did I visit Old Trafford thinking we’d be able to compete on the same level. Had September 23, 1989 been the catalyst for a reversal of fortunes and an avalanche of derby victories, I, too, would be reminiscing, commemorating and raising a glass to each anniversary.
‘But it didn’t. It was a false dawn. There was no golden era, no dramatic revival. Ferguson’s side of superstars went on to dominate English football while City’s trophy cabinet continued to gather dust.’
The young men of Manchester who were behind the rout of United and who might have formed the bedrock of the club for years to come, did not, generally, last long at Maine Road. Within seven years Manchester United had won their second Double in three seasons, while City had been relegated.
The win did not even guarantee Mel Machin’s future, even in the short term. There was no reason for Farmer Mel to think himself under threat. September 23 1989 was his lovely day. He had just signed a fresh three-year contract, spent £2m in the summer and been allowed to bring in Colin Hendry from Blackburn for £800,000.
Ruin came from the Midlands. On Armistice Day, November 11, Manchester City capitulated, 6-0 at Derby. A week later Nottingham Forest beat them 3-0 at Maine Road, and they were knocked out of the League Cup at home to Coventry.
Swales demanded Machin’s resignation that night. Machin refused. City were held 1-1 at Charlton the following weekend, a creditable enough result given the carnage of the past fortnight, but Swales had seen enough. This time he didn’t allow Machin the opportunity to argue his case. He sacked him the next day.
Machin phoned his players individually to tell them he was finished, which David White thought showed a bit of class. Machin was indignant. Through his eyes, he had promoted the club, pushed their young players to the fore, and then orchestrated one of Manchester City’s most stunning results since the glory days of Mercer and Allison.
This, then, was his reward. ‘I leave with my conscience clear,’ he told the press. ‘The club is in a far healthier position than when I arrived both financially and from a playing point of view.
‘I am surprised, disappointed and saddened. What do they want at Maine Road? If they react like this no wonder they have remained unsuccessful for so many years.’
The man who had lain prostrate on his bed on the evening of September 23 was still clinging on. On the same Saturday that Manchester City’s draw at Selhurst Park forced Swales’ hand, United had fought out a goalless stalemate with Chelsea at Old Trafford. Between 12 November and 4 March, the Stretford End would not celebrate a single league victory.
On the afternoon of 9 December, as Mark Bright drove Crystal Palace to a 2-1 win at Old Trafford, Pete Molyneux, a 35-year-old supporter from Salford, pulled out a banner he had been carrying in a plastic bag for three matches.
This was the time to show it: ‘Three Years of Excuses and It’s Still Crap. Ta-ra Fergie’. Molyneux was shaking with emotion and nerves as he held it up. It was an echo of Bet Lynch’s habitual parting remark to Mike Baldwin on Coronation Street, ‘Ta-ra, cock’. Nobody, least of all Pete Molyneux, expected Bet and Baldwin to have left the Street before Ferguson took his leave of Old Trafford.
PJ
‘PETER SWALES HAD A SAYING AND IT’S ONE THAT I STILL USE with my dogs,’ says Bernard Halford, who as club secretary worked with Swales every day of his twenty-year tenure as chairman. ‘He would ring up and ask for the matchday takings or how much we had made in the club shop and, when I told him, there would be a pause and he’d reply, “Not so good, eh.”
‘I say it to my dogs when I take them out for a walk and the weather’s bloody bad I say, “Not so good, eh.”’
Much of Peter Swales’ tenure was not so good. In the two decades of his rule, Manchester City were relegated twice and won a single trophy, the 1976 League Cup. They were about to be relegated again when he died of a heart attack a few days before Manchester City were to face Liverpool at Maine Road in the final game of the of 1995/96 season. He was 63.
‘Before the game the crowd observed a minute’s silence for his death,’ wrote David Conn, the journalist and author, in his memoir Richer than God. ‘As everybody hung their heads, there was a sense of shame. We had hounded Swales out in an unforgiving public humiliation for a childhood hero, Francis Lee, who we believed would make us happy again. And here we all were, on the brink of relegation.’
Manchester City were relegated in farcical circumstances, attempting to play out a draw in a match they had to win. It seemed somehow appropriate.
Twenty years after his death, Gary James, the club’s foremost historian, made a film called The Boys in Blue from footage uncovered in the North-West Film Archive. Among the treasures James discovered was film of Manchester City’s return from the 1934 FA Cup final, when a million lined the streets to greet them.
There was also a home movie by Harry Dowd, the club’s goalkeeper, of the team in Vienna during the 1970 Cup Winners’ Cup final. However, it was footage of Peter Swales that produced most comment and interest.
Swales was a stopgap appointment who lasted two decades. His survival in the teeth of so much disdain was remarkable given the fact that he never owned more than a third of the club. He was a politician and as Peter Reid, the last of the eleven managers he fired, remarked nobody becomes chairman of the FA’s international committee, as Swales did, without being a politician. To most fans he was Nixon.
His main ally was Stephen Boler, who as a young man had worked with Tom Farmer on a cheap tyre and exhaust company that was to become Kwik-Fit. Boler’s company, Homeform, created brands such as Moben Kitchens and Dolphin Showers.
In 1983 Boler had bought the Mere Country Club near the plush Cheshire market town of Knutsford. Reid was sent to the Mere for his job interview. Boler’s first question was, ‘Why should I give you the fucking job?’
Boler suffered a heart attack and died aged 55 in 1998, while travelling to his beloved game reserve in Johannesburg, but the Mere Country Club and Manchester City maintained strong relations for long after – Manuel Pellegrini stayed there when he succeeded Roberto Mancini as manager and habitually set off the fire alarms with his cigars.
Swales had made his money in Altrincham, first selling sheet music and instruments, then across the North West in television rentals, all in partnership with Noel White, who was to join him at the FA and become chairman of Liverpool. He resigned from the Anfield board in 2006 after accusing Rafa Benítez, accurately, of spending money the club did not have.
Peter Swales was born on Christmas Day and had grown up a fishmonger’s son in Ardwick, not far from where the Etihad Stadium now stands. One of his first journeys out of Manchester was to Somerset, where he did his national service.
At the barracks in Yeovil, Swales ran a freelance uniform pressing service. He hired out radios at ten shillings apiece and then charged the twenty men in the dorm a shilling each for listening to it. There was something of Sergeant Bilko about it.
As the partnership with White began making serious money, they bought into Altrincham’s football club. Then came the Rolls-Royce, then the racehorse, and then a house in the stockbroker belt of Bowdon.
Then came the investments into Manchester City. He was asked to join the board and in October 1973, when it was split between factions who were for or against Malcolm Allison, who had just walked out of Maine Road for the first but not the last time, Swales was asked to become chairman. He was forty years old.
In December he took to penning programme notes. ‘I know for sure that he is the right one,’ he wrote of his manager, Ron Saunders. ‘If he goes down, I go with him. It’s as blunt as that.’ It wasn’t, of course. Peter Swales was a captain who never felt the inclination to go down with his ship.
Bernard Halford called him ‘PJ’. Peter John Swales. In 1976, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin had started screening, featuring an overbearing boss called CJ who began every sentence with the phrase: ‘I didn’t get where I am today by . . .’ and who was surrounded by fawning sycophants. There was something of CJ in PJ.
Halford’s previous chairman at Oldham had been Ken Bates. They were similar men, although Bates and Swales could not abide each other. ‘When I was at Oldham, Ken Bates would ring me at seven in the morning to ask what was in the post. I would say, “But Ken, I’m still at home, I haven’t got to the office yet.”
‘PJ used to do similar things. We had to issue a weekly financial statement showing the opening bank balance, the closing bank balance and all the transactions in between and I remember the phone going at midnight and it was PJ. He said, “Have you changed the supplier of black bags to the stadium?”
‘I said “Yes.”
“Why have you done that?”
“I got a better price.”
‘He said “Right,” and then the phone went dead.
‘I had to ring Peter Swales every night at five past five when the ticket office had closed to tell him how much we had taken on each matchday. I have still got the book with all the amounts on.
‘When he died I had worked for him for twenty years. It was like losing a second father. It sounds funny to say it but it was true. He didn’t come to the games after Francis Lee replaced him as chairman and for much of his last season we couldn’t hold the board meetings at Maine Road because the fans would bombard the cars.
‘He suffered terribly from the demonstrations against him. I thought he was impregnable but the campaign against him killed him. He was recovering from a heart problem and then had another heart attack on the day his wife, Brenda, went to pick him up from Wythenshawe Hospital. While she was waiting she saw all these medics dashing about and she didn’t realise it was her husband they were dashing about for.
‘There were one or two odd things he did towards the end. He began asking me about my life. I was very close to my parents and I’d go to their grave every three weeks, and he was fascinated by that. He would start talking about death and dying. It must have been on his mind. There were not a lot of those conversations but we did have them.’
His love for Manchester City was genuine, if obsessive. Inside the house at Bowdon he created a shrine to the club. The walls were painted light blue, the shelves were full of memorabilia and he would retire there to watch videos of Manchester City victories. They were always wins. He could not stomach even heroic defeat.
However, given that Swales could not separate his love of City from a hatred of Manchester United, it was a flawed love.
‘My initial ten years in the job were completely overshadowed by wanting to get over Manchester United. I had seen City do well in the 1960s and we still couldn’t catch United for support so my life was devoted to doing them,’ he said in an interview with Gary James shortly before his death.
‘I wanted to see City’s name everywhere, in all the newspapers. I think that’s fair. The thing I never calculated upon was the impact Munich had on the world at large. There, you had a great club wiped out in a terrible accident and that really made United.
‘It cemented their name worldwide and we could never overcome that. Nobody will ever catch them now and that was the thing I tried to do. We came closer than anyone in the 1970s and we were in the same bloody city.’
One of his fellow directors was Chris Muir, a Labour councillor who was to defect to the Social Democratic Party and who ran Caldwell’s Stationers in St Peter’s Square. Muir was close to Swales and argued he was killed by the campaign to oust him. However, he also thought Swales’ obsession with Manchester United an embarrassment.
‘He was fanatical that City should be on a par with United and he would lose all rationality about it,’ Muir told the BBC journalists, Andy Buckley and Richard Burgess, in their book Blue Moon Rising. ‘I think it was one of his great weaknesses.
‘There were others on the board who had this obsession as well. Ian Niven wouldn’t even refer to United by name. He always called them Stretford Rangers. It was a bizarre way for a professional company to behave.’
By the Jubilee summer of 1977 Swales was at the height of his powers. His first season as chairman had culminated in United going down on the day of the Manchester derby at Old Trafford, ushered off to the Second Division by Denis Law’s back-heel.
City had been to Wembley twice for League Cup finals, losing to Wolverhampton Wanderers in 1974 and beating Newcastle two years later. Then they finished second in the First Division, just a point behind Liverpool.
Swales argued that Manchester City had been denied the championship by an own-goal. He reasoned that, had Dave Watson not headed past Joe Corrigan in December 1976, City would have beaten Liverpool at Maine Road and won the title. It was an argument the centre-half seemed to accept. The guilt gnawed at him.
Dennis Tueart, who had played with Watson in the Sunderland side that had won the FA Cup in 1973 and had won the League Cup with him at Manchester City, was rather more sanguine.
Tueart pointed out that Watson’s own-goal had come with four months of the season still to run. Liverpool won the return fixture 2-1 at Anfield in April, far closer to the end of the campaign. Then, with their thoughts turning to the European Cup final in Rome, the Reds had eased up at the finish. Bob Paisley’s side had not even needed to win the final game of the season to retain their title, and didn’t win any of their final four fixtures in total.
Nevertheless, Manchester City now had 23,000 season-ticket holders, more than any other club in England. Swales had dramatically reduced the price of being a supporter. A season ticket for the Kippax would cost £37 (£160 in today’s terms). The cheapest season tickets at Maine Road were cut from £16.50 to £11. Under Tony Book, they had improved season upon season; first a cup and now a serious tilt at the title. A push and a rush and the land would be theirs.
Swales had felt confident enough about the future to have invited the cameras of BBC Nationwide to follow Manchester City’s 1976/77 campaign. The coverage came with a particularly significant photograph taken outside the entrance to Maine Road.
All City’s staff were there. The players were in the background in the corner of the shot. Beside them were two women who washed the kit standing behind a basket of washing. There were the coaches, the groundsmen. There was Tony Book in loud check trousers looking as if he were about to present an episode of The Generation Game. Bernard Halford stood beside him. In front of them all was the board of directors and in front of them, in front of everyone, was Peter Swales.
Swales’ favourite film was The Cincinnati Kid, which starred Steve McQueen as a professional gambler. He sometimes referred to himself as ‘The Cincinnati Kid’. The irony is that The Cincinnati Kid climaxes with McQueen staking everything on his belief that his opponent, Edward G Robinson, does not have the jack of diamonds. Robinson produces the card and McQueen is ruined. You wonder if Swales ever watched the film to the end.
In 1979 came Swales’ jack of diamonds moment, the reckless gamble that would ruin Manchester City financially for a generation.
The previous year had seen the return of one of football’s great mavericks, who would upset Swales’ calculation that the challenge to Liverpool would come from the blue half of Manchester. It came instead from an altogether more unexpected place.
Brian Clough, whose genius appeared to have been crushed by the 44 days at Leeds and allowed to moulder in a backwater like Brighton, had won the championship with Nottingham Forest in 1978. He would follow it with two European Cups.
Manchester City had a messiah of their own, whom a good number of the board at Maine Road wanted back. Malcolm Allison was living in a remote village in Cornwall, about thirty years before that sort of thing became fashionable. It had one row of houses and a single pub. He was managing Plymouth, living with his second wife, Sally, a one-time Playboy bunny girl, 24 years his junior.
Clough and Allison had both walked out of the clubs where they had made their name – Derby and Manchester City – in the same year, 1973. They had both sought temporary refuge in ITV’s studios covering the 1974 World Cup in West Germany, but Allison’s subsequent career had been even more erratic than Clough’s.
The highlight had been taking Crystal Palace, who were then in the Third Division, to the FA Cup semi-finals in 1976. The trouble was that Palace were only in the Third Division because Allison had relegated them twice.
It was at Selhurst Park where Allison wore fedoras, fur coats and brandished a Havana cigar more ostentatiously than anyone since Winston Churchill. It was at Selhurst Park, where the soft-porn actress, Fiona Richmond, would join the players and their manager in the bath. It was at Selhurst Park where Malcolm Allison became Big Mal.
He was appointed City coach in January 1979. The country was in a state of anarchic crisis that midway through the month would see 1.5 million public service workers on strike. The winter was one of the coldest in memory and wiped out much of the Football League programme. Airports and train stations were shut. Reports of panic buying filled tabloid front pages, although the panic buying would be nothing to what would happen at Maine Road over the next eighteen months.
Malcolm Allison’s second coming wrecked Manchester City completely. By the time the experiment was over, the club had been hollowed out financially, weakened to the extent that it would not compete for the championship until the Abu Dhabi takeover.
There had been a core of the Manchester City board who had long wanted Allison back. Chris Muir, Simon Cussons, who ran the company that produced brands like Imperial Leather soap, and Ian Niven, who owned the Fletchers Arms pub in Denton on the city’s east side, were all ‘Malcolm’s Men’.
Swales was not a member of the club. One of his first announcements when becoming chairman was that there had been ‘too much showbiz at Maine Road’. In terms of not knowing Allison well, he was almost alone in the City boardroom.
And yet Niven, who during the war had been parachuted behind Japanese lines in Burma as part of the Chindit operations, said Swales had been the prime mover behind the recruitment of Allison.
It was Swales, said Niven, who had proposed a change of manager. The vote had been carried, 5-4. It was also Swales who proposed that Allison should be recalled. Again, the vote had been 5-4 in favour.
A month after Allison’s return, Manchester City’s finance director, John Humphreys, who was also the managing director of the shirt manufacturers Umbro, died at the age of 49. Humphreys was a very astute businessman who had ensured that every team in the 1966 World Cup wore Umbro kits. When he died, Manchester City decided they could do without a finance director. Allison would be driving the club without brakes.
There were some who welcomed the year zero fanaticism that saw Gary Owen, Asa Hartford, Peter Barnes, Mick Channon, Brian Kidd and Willie Donachie leave Maine Road. Hugh McIlvanney, then the most resonant voice in British sports journalism, claimed Swales had embraced the heroic aspect of the game. Before Allison’s arrival, McIlvanney wrote: ‘Manchester City had appeared incapable of getting a result against eleven cunningly-deployed dustbins.’
By the end, it seemed Swales might have done better buying the dustbins and putting blue shirts on them. It would have been much cheaper. The revolution was unimaginably disastrous.
The cost of Malcolm Allison’s transfers, wages and signing-on fees not included, was £4.14m. Put another way, it was more than Manchester City’s turnover. The entire club was in 1980 valued at £5.8m. The equivalent would be for City to have authorised Pep Guardiola to spend £392m in a single transfer window.
The players who arrived at Maine Road were nowhere near Guardiola quality. Dragoslav Stepanović was dredged from one of the more obscure parts of the German Second Division. Bobby Shinton arrived from Wrexham, Kevin Reeves from Norwich, Michael Robinson from Preston. Steve MacKenzie became English football’s most expensive teenager when Crystal Palace were paid £250,000 for his services.
Most notoriously, Steve Daley was signed from Wolverhampton Wanderers for £1.4m. When he was asked to go The Mere to finalise his transfer, Daley discovered he had no money on him and his car would run out of petrol on the M6.
He went back to Molineux and asked a member of staff for a few notes to tide him over. There would be more than a few notes spent when he arrived. It has been calculated that each one of Steve Daley’s appearances cost City £26,000, which was then the average price of a house in Manchester.
Allison was to claim that he had agreed a fee of £550,000 with Wolves for Daley when John Barnwell, travelling back to the Midlands from a charity function, was involved in a car crash that left him with a broken skull and a wing mirror embedded in his head. Richie Barker took over as Wolves caretaker manager and the fee rose to £650,000.
Swales took personal charge of the negotiations. Then just before Manchester City played Southampton at the Dell in April, Swales told Book, who was still nominally manager – a title he would lose during the summer – that he had secured Daley for £1.1m ‘plus tax’.
Allison argued that Swales had turned down his attempt to sign Ian Rush, who was then a teenager on Chester City’s books. According to Allison, the chairman thought £350,000 was too much for ‘a reserve’. Rush would become Liverpool’s all-time leading goalscorer.
Alan Oakes, Manchester City’s most-capped player, was manager of Chester, and was desperate for Rush to go to Maine Road. He said he had ‘offered Ian Rush on a plate’ to City, but neither manager nor chairman appeared that interested.
After Allison had departed, his successor John Bond was so keen to sign Trevor Francis from Nottingham Forest that he threatened to resign if the deal was not completed. Swales once more took charge. He agreed a fee with Brian Clough of £1.2m and offered Francis a salary of £100,000. Francis thought both fee and salary were far more than had been necessary to seal the deal.
Swales was to confess that two months after bringing Allison back he began to think he had made a terrible mistake. However, he took another seventeen months to act on those thoughts.