Tuesday, 22 December 1998
Joe Royle, sensing the supporters’ anger and frustration, made an impassioned plea. ‘I am disappointed with our current position – there’s no point in pretending otherwise,’ said Royle. ‘I know some supporters are starting to lose their faith, but I still believe this side will make a charge in the second half of the season. I honestly believe the team has improved since I arrived. I promise we will get things right.’
Supporter Andrew Waldon crystallised the sentiments of many City fans when he wrote an open letter to his son Daniel in City ’til I Cry!: ‘I apologise for picking City as my team. I apologise for buying my season ticket. I apologise for buying all the merchandise. I apologise for supporting City through thick and thin (yes, Daniel and I were part of the 3,007 against Mansfield) . . . I am sorry Daniel!’
TRAPPED BY THE PICTURES OF THE PAST
(The Times, Saturday, 26 December 1998)
The ball fell between George Best and a defender. The United winger stuck out a leg randomly. It was one of his less graceful contributions to a game of football and the ball ricocheted into the crowd. The incident, meaningless in itself, was forgotten within seconds by everyone except two people in the ground. Dennis and Kevin Cummins, dad and lad, red and blue, would remember the moment for the rest of their lives. It left one with broken glasses, the other unable to suppress his joy.
‘It was one of those big European Cup nights at Old Trafford in the ’60s,’ explains Kevin Cummins. ‘When Best went in for this tackle the ball flew into my dad’s face and broke his glasses. I remember thinking straight away, “Good, we can go home now.” My dad was a big United fan and he took me a few times but it always left me cold.’
Cummins had already fallen in love with Manchester’s other team. ‘Straight away there was something magical about City. Maine Road always had a unique atmosphere. It would be pissing down, and we’d see these ghostly figures moving about the pitch. It was always foggy in Manchester in the ’60s. I remember, at my first ever game, Bobby Kennedy did an overhead kick in the middle of the pitch, for no reason.’
If Cummins has an eye for the unusual or the extravagant, it serves him well in his profession as one of the UK’s leading rock photographers. Since rising to eminence during the punk era, he has photographed a wealth of stars, from David Bowie to The Rolling Stones, The Sex Pistols to Oasis. His work has been heavily profiled in the New Musical Express, where he has contributed scores of cover shots.
In recent years his photographs of Oasis have become indelible rock images. ‘I photographed them quite early on in their career. Their record label just said to me, “They’re City fans from Manchester, you’re bound to like them.”’ His first session with them was aborted when the band was refused entry into Holland after fighting broke out on the ferry carrying them across the North Sea. ‘I had flown out the day before and was with Noel Gallagher waiting for the others. There’d been a punch-up or something with some Chelsea fans and they were sent straight back to England.’
Subsequent sessions were given a uniquely City theme. In London they were photographed in Flitcroft Street (in tribute to the former City player, Garry Flitcroft), while Maine Road was used as a backdrop when the Gallagher brothers donned their City shirts with the aptly named club sponsors, Brother, stamped across them. Unfortunately, the pictures were rejected as potential front cover shots by the New Musical Express. ‘The editor told me that the paper was for winners, not losers.’ Cummins’s eyes narrow and his lips become pursed as he imparts this information.
Football has become showbiz in shin pads and Cummins has seen this at uncomfortably close quarters (‘I’ve heard that Mick Jagger is trying to pass himself off as a Chelsea fan now,’ he sighs), but to him it is a heartfelt, heartbreaking experience, nothing fey or whimsical. He was the only City supporter in an all-boys, all-United, Catholic school in Salford. His loyalty stretched to watching City reserves; he danced on the pitch at St James’s Park, Newcastle, when City won the League Championship on 11 May 1968 – he recalls the date as effortlessly as he might his own birthday.
Football, and City in particular, has given him, at different times, a sense of kinship, pride, joy, loyalty, defiance and, more recently, acute disappointment and unhappiness. ‘Even when we win, watching City still spoils my weekend. There’s no real joy in beating teams in this division. We should win every game. I have no pleasure in watching City play at all. It is like seeing an aged relative riddled with cancer, you go out of a sense of duty.’ An overstatement, surely? ‘My mother died of cancer 18 months ago, and coming up to see City does feel very similar. City have been part of my life for such a long time.’
He is a shareholder and attended the club’s recent annual meeting where, among others, he was able to express his concern. ‘I am upset and angry about what has happened to this club. Everyone is transient in football except the supporters. All these platitudes we are hearing now will mean nothing if we don’t get promotion. The crowd will be halved next season if we’re still in this league. People can’t stand the heartbreak any longer.’
Cummins does not rate Joe Royle, with whom he had a bizarre encounter a few years ago. They met in a corridor at Goodison Park while Royle was still manager of Everton. Cummins, weighed down with camera equipment, was to take his picture for an interview piece in a football magazine. Royle misunderstood and thought he had breached the club’s security to snatch a photo of their new signing, Andrei Kanchelskis. ‘He just went for me and got me in a headlock shouting and swearing,’ says Cummins. Fortunately, Royle was told quickly of his mistake and was deeply apologetic.
‘Royle is not the man to lead us to the Premiership – and this isn’t because I’ve still got a grudge against him. I don’t think his track record is particularly good. It’s too much a case of jobs for the boys. It’s some bloke with a cigar saying, “Now, who shall I get now, my old mate Alan Ball, or my old mate Joe Royle?”’
Cummins attends matches with his 12-year-old daughter, Ella, who is equally fanatical about City. She first became interested in football during the 1994 World Cup while they were on holiday in Italy. They watched the final between Italy and Brazil in a bar. Before Roberto Baggio’s infamous penalty miss, she burst out crying, sensing what was to happen. ‘Everyone was asking me whether we were Italian, and I had to tell them we weren’t.’ Like her dad, she simply had the passion to care, too much. ‘She was introduced to football by despair,’ he says, not needing to add that this was a natural precursor to a lifetime supporting City.
City take on Wrexham today and Stoke City at Maine Road on Monday. Cummins will embark on two 400-mile round trips from his home in south London. While a game against Stoke is attractive enough, he is affronted by the air of normality that awaits him at Maine Road for other games. ‘I don’t want to buy the match programme and read articles like ‘Welcome to Gillingham’. I don’t care who plays for Gillingham, we shouldn’t be playing them. The programme should be edged in black.’
Saturday, 26 December 1998
Wrexham 0 Manchester City 1
City won for the first time in six matches thanks to an impressive display by Nicky Weaver at a windswept Racecourse Ground. Gerard Wiekens’s headed goal secured the win and lifted them to seventh in the table.
Monday, 28 December 1998
Manchester City 2 Stoke City 1
A stirring performance ignited the 31,000 crowd who willed City to victory after they had fallen behind to a goal by Larus Sigurdsson. Paul Dickov scored City’s first goal at Maine Road for almost two months and Gareth Taylor notched a late winner. ‘You could feel the confidence flowing through the side once I had scored,’ said Dickov, who had just celebrated the birth of a son, Sam.
Two successive league wins ended a wretched year on a relatively upbeat note.
Wednesday, 30 December 1998
Five young City players were nominated by Jim Cassell as potential future stars – Shaun Wright-Phillips, the son
of West Ham United striker Ian Wright; Leon Mike; David Laycock; Steven Hodgson; and Shaun Holmes.
Six
The Return of the Native
TWIN TRIUMPH OFFERS GLIMMER OF HOPE
(The Times, Saturday, 2 January 1999)
The phone line was making and breaking. We could hear an intermittent blast of agitated chatter. Out there, on this cold, damp afternoon a group of Manchester City supporters were driving away from York. Their team had lost, the day was in ruins, so they rang their local radio station’s phone-in. ‘I don’t know what more there is to say,’ said the one with the mobile phone. There was a short silence, and then swearing and shouting, the sound of frustration foaming white-hot. York, beautiful city, great architecture. York 2, Manchester City 1. York, a long way from home.
Manchester City’s defeat at York was just two weeks ago. It feels like a life time away. Two consecutive wins over Christmas have suddenly, wonderfully, transformed Maine Road. A fortuitous win at Wrexham was followed by a thrilling 2–1 victory against promotion favourites Stoke City.
‘We’ve turned the corner, now. Just watch us go,’ was the on-air message from the supporters at tea-time on Boxing Day. They were still buoyant, still drunk on the elixir of victory. During the second half against Stoke, Maine Road was no longer the mausoleum of moans and groans, but the epicentre of joy. They cheered relentlessly, believed in their team, and their generosity of spirit encouraged the players to hold the ball, enjoy its company, take on their opponents, shoot for goal – the simple tenets of a game of football that players renounce when they are bereft of confidence.
The relationship between City and their supporters has been strained in the past few months. Where the fans expected a certain amount of style and flair, especially in the relatively impoverished surroundings of their division, the team has barely looked cohesive or, more importantly, particularly impassioned. Willie Donachie said a few weeks ago that no matter how disappointed the fans were, they should know that the players feel the pain of each defeat ‘ten times as much’. Donachie, an ex-player and a marvellous club man, really has no right to quantify the hurt supporters feel. It is between them and their hearts.
In his programme notes for the Stoke game, Joe Royle complained of a section of support which was ‘very vociferous and very negative’. There has undeniably been an air of disgruntled edginess about Maine Road for the past few seasons. The supporters are like the good child gone bad. They were loyal (through all those relegations), obedient (they bought the tickets when asked) and attentive (they have never diverted their eyes elsewhere, like Old Trafford, for example), but their efforts have gone without reward. So, 20 years later, a good number have grown up petulant, reckless, faithless and frustrated.
Inevitably, there has been a clamour for scapegoats. Various players have found the arrival of the ball at their feet accompanied by a cacophony of boos. Lee Bradbury became Lee Bad-Buy when he struggled to find form, while Richard Edghill, Tony Vaughan and Shaun Goater are currently under pressure to impress. The players should not fret too excessively, for the City faithful are famously forgiving. The deal is simple enough – they must wear the laser blue shirt with the same degree of pride as the fans would if given the chance themselves.
Until recently, Royle and David Bernstein have largely escaped criticism. Supporters have honoured what was effec-tively an agreement to remain patient while both implemented their changes. Royle has now been in tenure for ten months and Bernstein for nine. In the life of a football club, it is no time at all. During this period of transition, supporters steadied themselves for a level of inconsistency, but did not expect home defeats against the likes of Preston, Reading and Mansfield Town. So, throughout December in particular, they have started to question whether these are the men to restore City to greatness, or Division One of the Nationwide League at the very least.
The two Christmas victories have thrust City back into the promotion frame (most likely via the play-offs, to which a cluster of about 10 other clubs also have a claim), but they should not falsify what has been a woeful campaign. They were expected to storm through the division, treating the cloggers and battlers with contempt, but they have won just 9 of their 24 games and, in seventh place, they find themselves trailing the likes of Bournemouth and Gillingham.
All the same, they close the year on a rare note of optimism, and should be allowed, at last, to enjoy the satisfaction of a job well done. The current form might finally represent the ‘turning of a corner’ and not another harrowing trip around an Esher drawing, where ‘corners’ propagate themselves or lead to nowhere in particular. More goals and more wins will transform the passion within Maine Road into something positive and handsome, no longer negative and ugly.
Saturday, 2 January 1999
Wimbledon 1 Manchester City 0 (FA Cup Third Round)
City, FA Cup finalists on eight occasions and winners on four, had their stuttering cup run ended by Wimbledon in an ill-tempered match.
Jason Euell was sent off for two bookable offences. City’s Andy Morrison and Wimbledon’s Carl Cort were dismissed after a scuffle. ‘The double sending-off was absolutely laughable. There was nothing in it,’ said Joe Kinnear, the Wimbledon manager. It was City’s seventh sending-off of the season.
Morrison, after watching a re-run of the incident on video, said: ‘It’s embarrassing, like watching a couple of kids in the playground.’
Carl Cort scored the only goal of the game which was watched by 6,312 City supporters among the crowd of 11,226.
Tuesday, 5 January 1999
Joe Royle gave further reassurance of his confidence in the team. ‘Despite the cynics, the knockers and the strange beasts who find themselves on radio phone-ins, promotion is still a very realistic target for us,’ he snapped.
Wednesday, 6 January 1999
City revealed that they hoped to sign Manchester United winger Terry Cooke for a three-month loan period once he had completed a similar stint at Wrexham.
Cooke, 21, who had been with United since the age of 13, was resurrecting his career after a serious knee injury. He had impressed Joe Royle during City’s recent trip to the Racecourse Ground.
NOBILITY REIGNS IN THE COURT OF KING COLIN
(The Times, Saturday, 9 January 1999)
Snorkel-jacket pockets were stuffed full of them, or else they were a blur in someone’s hand as complex swaps were negotiated. Thin strips of pink chewing gum accompanied the cards and this gave them a fruity aroma, the sweet smell of youth.
Football cards were a schoolyard currency of their own. In Manchester, a City or United player was worth a bag of conkers; unless they were George Best or Colin Bell, then you were talking a Subbuteo team, three Scorcher annuals and a bag of conkers.
Best and Bell were the antithesis of each other. Best was young, gifted and reckless, Bell was young and gifted. Their personalities were disparate but, for different reasons, they personified a certain cool. On the field, Bell was both flamboyant and industrious, a natural athlete who was graceful on the ball, tenacious without it. Away from the pitch, he had a rare humility, a quiet dignity that is almost extinct in the modern game.
During his 13 years as a player at Maine Road, he helped win the First and Second Division Championships, the European Cup-Winners Cup, the FA Cup and two Football League Cups. He also collected 48 England caps after making his international début as a 22-year-old. He played his last game for City 20 years ago, yet the mention of his name still draws forth heartfelt eulogies from supporters. He reminds them, of course, of a classic era in the club’s history, but he epitomises much more. He is without artifice, true to himself, devoid of ego and pretension. They call him King Colin in the blue parts of Manchester.
I usually travel light – a notebook and a pen – but, as I knock at the door of Bell’s house, I have a bag over my shoulder containing numerous photos and football cards for him to autograph. Word has got around, and I’m suddenly an emissary for every football f
an I have met in the preceding two days. ‘Colin Bell? You’re going to meet Colin Bell?’ Soon, sun-stained and frayed posters from old Shoot! magazines are thrust before me: ‘You’ve got to get him to sign this . . .’
The flowing, straw-coloured hair of his playing days has been replaced by a spiky cut that Ian Rush’s barber might have supplied. His labrador pounds into the hall and Bell wrestles it into another room. Bell, 52, is still lithe, at just a few pounds over his playing weight. He rarely does interviews, so he converses like he would at a bus stop or on a train, without resorting to formula or overwrought anecdotes.
His father, John Bell, worked as a miner from the age of 12 in their home-town of Hesleden, Durham. Bell’s mother, Elizabeth, died soon after he was born and he was brought up by her sister, Ella. He is indistinct about his mother’s death. ‘She went into hospital to have me, but didn’t come out again,’ he says.
As a boy, he was happy in his own company, and would spend hours playing football alone. ‘I’ve never really needed close friends, I’ve always been a loner. I used to go on the Green and play football all day. I’d sometimes throw a tennis ball on to a sloping roof just to practise heading or chesting as it came down. I never walked anywhere, I would always run. I had to be where I was going in the shortest possible time.’
A clutch of clubs, including Arsenal, were interested in signing him but he chose Bury. ‘I went there simply because they were the friendliest club. They had made me really welcome. I went for £12 a week, but if anyone else had offered me £50 a week I would still have gone to Bury.’
Bury were managed by Bob Stokoe, whose parents had moved to the town from the north-east to be near their son. ‘A few of the players used to go round to their house on Sunday night and play cards with them. Bob’s mum would bake a cake and biscuits. It used to be the highlight of the week.’ He relates the story without acknowledging how downbeat and anachronistic it sounds.
Blue Moon: Down Among The Dead Men With Manchester City Page 11