Thirty-Five Years

On 28 February 1976 Manchester City beat Newcastle United 2–1 at Wembley to win the League Cup Final. At the time, I was in my second year at University. Since I had begun supporting City in 1967, a long series of football’s glittering prizes had fallen their way, and this seemed to be just the latest success.

With players of the calibre of Joe Corrigan, Peter Barnes, Dennis Tueart, Dave Watson and Joe Royle in the team, there seemed to be no reason why City should not be able to continue in the same vein, and so when I think back to that February day 35 years ago, I remember a sense of inevitability, almost of routine as the result came through from Wembley.

A friend at the time spoke to me of his envy at the way that City ‘just seemed to win things’ apparently without the necessity of straining every sinew and without having to battle almost insurmountable odds to do so, unlike more ‘ordinary’ clubs. I understood the sentiment but of course I was quite happy for the status quo to continue.

If I had been told then that I would have to wait 35 years until 2011 before seeing City lift another trophy, I would have simply stared with blank incomprehension. It is unlikely that my brain would have been able to process the information.

Many other books have been written about what subsequently went wrong at Manchester City, but by 1983, they had been relegated and so began an unstable phase that was only broken by brief bursts of optimism (the FA Cup run of 1981, the progress ground out under Peter Reid’s management a decade later), and which arguably did not end until a few short years ago with the Abu Dhabi takeover.

In the intervening period, I have graduated, started work, got married, raised a family and have now reached semi-retirement, but in all that time I have not seen City win anything. It has been a very long wait, during which I have often wondered (in my more depressed moments) (ok, yes, usually under the influence of alcohol) whether I would ever be lucky enough to see City experience any more success before I died.

The long history of those barren years, and in particular the numerous self-inflicted disasters along the way, create a specific type of mind-set in older supporters of Manchester City, a mind-set which is automatically suspicious of hope, of light at the end of the tunnel, and which instead can only imagine the pain of being hit by the train coming the other way.

This then is the backdrop against which the events of season 2010–11 unfolded. This book is an attempt to describe the wildly oscillating feelings and emotions of an ordinary supporter, watching as, for once, all the banana skins were safely negotiated and the season ended with the FA Cup coming back to Manchester City.

If the last thirty-five years have taught me anything, it is never to take this current success for granted, so these days every win, every point gained are relished more than they ever were before. Long painful experience has taught that disaster could be just around the corner, and with Manchester City it so often is (oops there I go again).

But this year’s success can rightly be enjoyed, and so I hope that this book serves to document, as well as the more usual dread of ‘what’s coming next?’ the pleasure of the season and its ultimately happy ending.