Blue Moon: Down Among The Dead Men With Manchester City

by Mark Hodkinson

  Inevitably, Chris Bird was asked to conduct the annual general meeting of Manchester City plc. Bird is nominally the club’s PR man, but he appears to be fed on kryptonite or spinach, such is his capacity for work. In daylight hours he talks in good style for City, while after dark he tours supporters’ club meetings, an evangelist for the Church of the Latter Day Blues.

  While we all coughed those nervy, formal coughs, Bird donned a headset microphone, the kind normally the preserve of rock stars on their stadium comeback tour. His movements were a tad wooden, a tad Virgil Tracey in fact; someone might well have murmured, at the appropriate point: ‘Thunder Bird Are Go!’

  Before Bird invited the assembled shareholders to have their say, David Bernstein opened the meeting. He has been criticised previously for indulging in slick-speak – talking a lot, but saying very little. To his credit, he made no attempt to excuse another relegation and a trading loss of £6.3 million which has left City paying more than £21,000 in interest every week. In his written statement he summed up last season as ‘nothing short of disastrous’; clearly, this was not the fey, soft-focus terminology of the politician. He is the type of man who will give you the measured formal treatise, then look you in the eye and add: ‘You’re up the creek, pal.’

  The club has, he says, thrown money at its problems for too long. He wants a measured approach, stability, solid foundations, more attention to detail; never has common sense seemed so astounding. There were almost sighs of glee among the audience. Most in the hall could boast only a handful of shares. To them a share is a souvenir, something more distinctive and worthwhile than the fare sold at the club’s superstore. It also allows them to stand, once a year, toe-to-toe with the board of directors.

  City, despite an occasional tetchiness borne from their current dire position, remain a refreshingly open club. Questions from the floor were answered candidly and patiently. Joe Royle took the top-table less than two weeks after major surgery on his hip. He could easily have stayed at home ‘recuperating’.

  An old chap took to his feet to proclaim the club’s new era of reconciliation in stirring fashion. ‘The days of recrimination and criticism are over. We should all get behind the team and with a bit of luck, please God, we will get back to our good days, back to the Premier League.’ The applause was magnificent.

  Another had clearly not heard the chairman’s message. ‘Merlin the magician wouldn’t be able to get us out of this division with the team we’ve got. We are not going to carry on year after year watching garbage. You have got to find money to buy new players now,’ he said. Bernstein, kindly in the circumstances, repeated his previous speech of prudence and stability.

  After years travelling to Arsenal, Liverpool, etc. City supporters are palpably not enjoying their wet Saturdays in Wigan, nor indeed – as in this week – their windy Tuesdays in Lincoln. ‘This division is doing my head in,’ said one shareholder. ‘It really is driving me daft. Do you know what it is like to have to drive away from places like Northampton?’

  Joe Royle, despite the hobble, was in top form. ‘This division is driving me mad as well,’ he admitted. He conceded that the team lacked composure and quality, but said he was looking to find better players. ‘But I don’t want anyone who is out to financially rape the club,’ he added.

  His tactics were questioned in detail. ‘Why do we keep whacking the ball up to Paul Dickov who is only 4ft 2ins tall? Can’t they pass the ball?’ asked one exasperated fan. Dickov, as he would point out, is actually five feet five inches, though the point remains salient. Royle said he wanted more wide players and would return to a 4–4–2 system when he had settled on his final squad.

  Among supporters there is belief in both Royle and Bernstein. They are seen as the end-of-the-line, the place where they have come to rest after all the futile swapping and changing. They are the men for a crisis – cool, thoughtful, shrewd, pragmatic, and with their own kind of differing charm. In pub terms, Royle would entertain them in the vault, while Bernstein holds court in the lounge.

  ‘This club has had a charisma transplant. Let’s get the fire in our bellies and sock it to them,’ said one shareholder. For a few seconds, such was the emotion, they might have broken into a rendition of ‘Blue Moon’. Instead, Chris Bird formally closed proceedings and while feet were shuffling and overcoats pulled back on, someone volunteered a vote of confidence in the manager and the chairman.

  The bizarre club-crest of an eagle, three stars and a ship continued to drift across the curtains. Hopefully, the eagle will one day be superseded by a phoenix.

  Saturday, 24 October 1998

  Manchester City 0 Reading 1

  The headlines told it straight: ‘Royle Misery Continues’, ‘Sorry City Looking Down In The Dumps’, ‘Williams Sends City To A New Low’. A cheeky back-heeled goal after 56 minutes from leading scorer Martin Williams secured Reading’s first ever win at Maine Road. It was City’s second successive home defeat and their third loss in four games.

  The dismissal of Danny Tiatto, City’s fourth red card of the season, was the only spark of life in a drab game. He was involved in a scuffle with Bryon Glasgow who received a booking.

  The defeat left City in eleventh position, already 10 points behind league leaders, Stoke City. ‘My message to the fans is don’t panic – we will get it right,’ said Joe Royle.

  For Glyn Chadwick, writing in King of the Kippax, it was all too much: ‘As far as I can see we are deep in the shit. Unless somebody takes over the club and pumps some big money in, I think the only way is down and I for one am not going to shell out £300 to watch more of this crap.’

  Monday, 26 October 1998

  Midfielder Ged Brannan joined Scottish Premier League side Motherwell for a fee of £378,000. He had cost City £750,000 when he signed from Tranmere Rovers 18 months earlier.

  Tuesday, 27 October 1998

  City supporter Will Aldersley, travelling through north Vancouver in Canada, was surprised to find a signpost to ‘Paul Lake’.

  Thursday, 29 October 1998

  Crystal Palace finally signed striker Lee Bradbury after doubts over a back injury had threatened to halt the deal. The fee was £1.5 million, rising to £2 million after a specified number of appearances.

  Bradbury, a former England Under-21 International, had cost City £3 million when he joined them from Portsmouth. During his 15 months at the club he made 29 appearances and scored seven goals. As many newspapers pointed out, he had cost the club £135,000 per goal.

  Joe Royle completed the loan signings of 20-year-old Everton striker Michael Branch and Huddersfield Town’s 28-year-old defender Andy Morrison.

  The club learned of the death of major shareholder Stephen Boler. Boler, 55, died from a heart attack on a business trip to South Africa.

  CASSELL PERFORMS HIS CIVVY DUTY IN QUEST FOR BEST

  (The Times, Saturday, 31 October 1998)

  The telephone rings for the third time in the past hour. It’s the same man who called on the previous occasions. Young feet pad quickly along the hallway to answer it. ‘Dad, it’s Joe again,’ says 10-year-old James Cassell.

  The door to the hall is left slightly ajar. After a cursory greeting, the two men talk football, serious football. ‘He’s good from set-pieces, I agree, but I’d be a bit concerned about his lack of pace,’ says Jim Cassell, Manchester City’s chief scout and director of academy.

  Joe Royle and Jim Cassell have plenty to discuss. City have lost three of their last four home matches and are mid-table in Division Two. Supporters visiting their website have made their feelings known after an abysmal 1–0 defeat against Reading last Saturday: ‘The team has little more talent than a pub side,’ complained one, while another wrote from the heart: ‘Gloom, gloom, gloom . . . I’m fed up of City ruining my weekend.’

  With a certain inevitability, Royle has announced this week that he is on the look-out for new players. Of course he is, mutter City’s army of sceptics. Where is he looking? On the golf
course? At a sportsman’s dinner held in the plush environs of somewhere south of Manchester? An hour or two spent in the home of Jim Cassell would reaffirm their faith, re-light their fires.

  This is Cassell – and, indirectly, Joe Royle – caught unawares, caught off-side. It is tea-time on a wretched Wednesday night. The rain outside is falling downwards and sideways. The phone is white-hot: Joe asking Jim, Jim advising Joe, 4–4–2, 3–5–2, a sigh, a pause, another player assessed, another idea ignited. Twenty minutes later, it starts all over again. Along with Willie Donachie, the pair form the triad that effectively shapes Manchester City.

  Within football, there is a disparaging term for those that draw a living from the game without having played it. They call them ‘civvies’. Cassell’s professional playing career lasted all of two full matches for Bury in the mid-1960s. Afterwards he worked as a scout and later chief scout for Oldham Athletic. All the same, he is, in effect, a ‘civvy’, not that he cares. ‘Football is the most insular profession there is. They have created a jobs-for-the-boys logic. I think increasingly people realise that there needs to be a little more thought, preparation and compassion in the game,’ he says.

  Manchester City, perhaps more than any other club, has been populated in recent times by egos in tracksuits and pin-stripes. There has been a proclivity to self-preservation, thyself above all else. The notion no longer stands, however, that the man shouting loudest and longest will inherit the club. Jim Cassell, much like the chairman, David Bernstein, is proof of the fact. He is thoughtful and shrewd, candid and friendly, immaculate in a suit and tie and wire-framed glasses, the original Gentleman Jim. ‘It’s been said before now that I look a bit like a Roman Catholic priest,’ he laughs. He likes the comparison.

  Cassell’s brief has been to restructure the club’s youth policy. Appropriately, for a former book-keeper and local government officer, his approach has been fastidiously methodical. ‘This has been missing at City. There was no one picking up the bits of paper off the floor, no one taking care of the detail,’ he says. In the summer he presented a 51-page dossier to the board. It revealed a club run by people without real job specifications, where the hierarchical structure was muddled and essential facilities had to be borrowed, or were missing altogether. ‘A football club is a bit like a hotel. You’ve got to get the structure in place and running properly before you can achieve anything,’ he says.

  The framework is now clearly defined – and funded to the tune of £500,000 – but Cassell and his team still face the problem of attracting promising young players to Maine Road, and ensuring that they remain. ‘Parents are more aware that sport can give their boys a lucrative standard of living these days. We are totally up front with them, we don’t try to kid anyone and we always stress that we put the welfare of their boy first.’

  He concedes that parents, above all, want to see their sons connected to a ‘winning club’, which City clearly are not. The inducements might be fiercely homespun, but it would be foolish to underestimate his own role within the design. Parents will trust Cassell, view him as a man of his word, and this will be persuasive as the sport loses itself increasingly to greed and self-gain.

  Cassell is on a five-year contract, and it will take at least that long for his young charges to work through to the first team. ‘I know that I cannot fail. Failure is if you don’t give everything to the job and we’re working our socks off,’ he says.

  The phone goes again. He tells Royle he will have to cut short the conversation, he has to dash to see a reserves match between Oldham Athletic and Bolton Wanderers. It is still raining. Oldham’s Boundary Park is so far above sea level it is submerged in the clouds. Only a fool or an obsessive would venture out on such a night. ‘I always get a cup of tea off them when I go back to Oldham,’ he says. That’s fine, then.

  • Of City’s personnel, Jim Cassell came closer than anyone to typifying the good heart which has earned the club such widespread historical support. He was courteous, open, gentle, trusting; the consummate ambassador.

  During our interview he was amazingly frank. He told me his salary and allowed me to borrow the report he had compiled on the club’s youth policy. It would have been easy for me to generate a great deal of copy from this, but his is not the kind of trust easily betrayed.

  I made light in the column of his ‘civvy’ status, but it is an issue within the club. Like most clubs, City has had its share of gritty, feisty characters to whom Cassell is an enigma. They like to portray him as the schoolteacher twit caught blinking in the hurly-burly of football. Certainly, they do not feel he is chief scout material, a role habitually undertaken by seasoned ex-pros, unafraid of breaching an unfamiliar dressing-room or resorting to subterfuge or duplicity to get their man. To their mind Cassell’s decency is meekness, his politeness a cover for indecision.

  While it was impossible to gauge his effectiveness or otherwise in the duality of his job, it was palpably a boon that City should have someone of such a kindly demeanour working with their young players. He was also the counterpoint to the very men who might try to undermine him.

  Saturday, 31 October 1998

  Manchester City 2 Colchester United 1

  Loan signings Michael Branch and Andy Morrison made impressive débuts as City won at home for the first time in almost two months. They were booed off after a goalless first-half, but substitute Ian Bishop rejuvenated their play after the break.

  Kevin Horlock gave City the lead with a 49th-minute penalty. Four minutes later, Horlock’s corner was headed in at the near post by Morrison. Colchester pulled a goal back through Jason Dozzell. ‘Morrison was strong-willed and proved a good passer. And at last we have someone who talks at the back,’ said Joe Royle.

  Four

  A Talent to Annoy

  Tuesday, 3 November 1998

  David Bernstein wrote to all club employees informing them that the death of Stephen Boler would not affect the club’s stability.

  Wednesday, 4 November 1998

  Supporters were surprised to learn that Kinkladze had returned to Manchester. The Kinkladze in question was a greyhound named after the former City player, a regular visitor to the city’s Belle Vue stadium.

  Friday, 6 November 1998

  Andy Morrison completed his £80,000 move from Huddersfield Town, two days after issuing City with a ‘sign me’ plea.

  City were linked with various wingers, among them Lee Sharpe of Leeds United, Joey Beauchamp of Oxford United and George Donis of AEK Athens.

  THE WISDOM OF MR GRIMSDALE

  (The Times, Saturday, 6 November 1998)

  A football – a jazzy white one with green chevrons – makes the occasional cameo appearance. Otherwise, its middle-aged men eating, drinking, adjusting their ties, or photographs of empty dining-rooms, all starched napkins and sparkling silverware.

  The brochure offering the ‘very best in corporate and match-day entertainment’ makes no mention of Manchester City’s current league status. Imagine: ‘Lovely meal, excellent wine, and what’s for afters?’ ‘Hmmm, how about Macclesfield, distinctly hard-boiled, or Gillingham, new to the menu, and a bit of an unknown quantity?’

  City, to their credit, have stayed resolutely in the corporate age, determined to view their form on the pitch as a mere blip, a side dish as they serve up lashings of new potatoes and goodwill in one of their three impressive suites, each with a suitably grandiose title – Millennium, Centenary and Silver. A new addition has been the facility to host full-scale marriage ceremonies. Funerals might be more tricky.

  The club has 80 executive boxes in the Kippax and Platt Lane stands, the price for a season ranging from £8,500 to £14,000. Only a handful remain untenanted which means the club has raised more than £700,000 from these glasshouses dotted around the ground.

  Traditionalists almost phlegm-up the words ‘executive boxes’ whenever they rue the state of the modern game. They are seen as final, indisputable proof that football has gone irredeemably limp-wristed
. The flower-pressers are in the house, the real men have gone home to creosote the fence or sandpaper their teeth. They hold the view that the pleasure of a game of football is heightened to an almost sensual level only in bitter adversity. The ice has to freeze together extruding parts of your anatomy; the bloke in front must cough and wheeze through a pack of 20; the kid in the next-but-one seat, must scream, ‘Come on, City,’ every three seconds in a voice so high-pitched it makes Alan Ball sound like Barry White.

  And so to the dilemma. It’s Halloween, the air is cold, grey and damp and, behold, glamour-ghouls Colchester United are in town. City have lost three of their last four home matches. The home supporters have not had this much fun since their car broke down at the lights, in winter, in the rain, and no one stopped to help. So, what’s it to be? Out in the cold, a man of the people, or in Executive Box Seven in the Kippax Stand? The ticket is in your pocket, your principles somewhere close to knee height, and falling.

  ‘Hello sir,’ is the welcome, and a free programme. ‘Level three, sir.’ Everywhere there is the smell of coffee and the distant clip-clip sound of cutlery. Women in white shirts and black skirts whisk purposefully in and out of ante-rooms. It feels like a cruise liner about to set sail.

  Box Seven is a good size and furnished with a family-sized pack of biscuits and a fridge stocked with beer and minerals. The television is showing a Norman Wisdom film. The cosy domesticity is only shattered when someone has the audacity to slide open the patio doors: bloody hell, there’s a football match out there! The noise is like a sudden blast of heat, and then it is gone as the door is snapped shut. Norman has dropped a crate of milk bottles and is shrieking, ‘Mr Grimsdale, Mr Grimsdale!’

  The box comes complete with balcony seats, two rows perched behind a veranda in the – gasp, shiver – open air. This is perfect for leaning upon wearing a thoughtful, ever-so-meaningful expression à la Terry Venables when the Match of the Day camera pans up to the stands.