Their manager, Joe Mercer, set the tone in the week building up to the game at Newcastle in which they clinched the title, announcing to the newspapermen that he had already been practising the walk to Stretford to collect the trophy from Manchester United, the reigning champions. “I shall personally take great pleasure in walking down to Old Trafford on Sunday morning to pick up the trophy.”
Unless, of course, his assistant, Malcolm Allison got there first. Allison’s prediction was that City would “terrify Europe to death” the following season. “There is no limit to what this team can achieve. We will win the European Cup. European football is full of cowards and we will terrorise them with our power and attacking football. I think we will be the first team to play on Mars.”
Not quite. City were drawn against Fenerbahce in the first round. Mercer’s team drew 0-0 in Manchester, lost the return leg 2-1 and never made it further than Istanbul. All of which, one imagines, was a source of considerable amusement at Old Trafford bearing in mind Allison used to walk in front of the Stretford End before derbies, holding up five fingers to predict the score and gesturing as if flicking away United like dirt.
Allison once admitted that he “loathed the bumptious, patronising tones of some of their players, their hangers-on and many of their supporters” and nor was he a particularly gracious guest, a few days after arriving in Manchester in 1965, when he was invited to United’s league championship dinner and Matt Busby, mid-speech, recognised him in the audience. Busby asked everyone to welcome him as an outstanding coach who would provide strong competition. “You can bet on that, Matt, baby,” Allison, 18 years his junior, responded. Different days, indeed.
The history between these two clubs is always fascinating and it can be a pity sometimes, in these sanitised days of media training and PR sensibilities, that none of the main protagonists in the current battle for supremacy – not even, most surprisingly, José Mourinho – wants to be accused of disturbing the peace.
Yet this is a deliberate policy now at City: achieve first, talk afterwards. The modern City have realised that a club at the top do not have to shout so loud to be noticed and, quietly, are just getting on with their business, free of controversy or confrontation. There is no need for one-upmanship now such as the Carlos Tevez “Welcome to Manchester” poster or all those times when new signings would be drilled, parrot-fashion, to recite lines about City being the club with more local supporters.
In reality, it has always been silly to think United fans do not exist in huge numbers in Manchester and, deep down, most sensible City fans would admit it, too. Ian Niven, who had a 30-year stint on the club’s board, used to say that out of 200 people in his office he could find only half a dozen City supporters. It is not an exact science, perhaps, but Mark Hodkinson’s 1999 book, Blue Moon, offers a different gauge. Hodkinson recalls how the old Booth Hall children’s hospital in Blackley had a poster of George Best at one end and, at the other, Colin Bell. Choose your end, choose your team. “Where it was once blue, red, blue, red, it is now red, red, blue, red,” the author writes. “The kids are United.”
It is a different city now, football‑wise, and one of the legacies of the Abu Dhabi era is that there are a lot more children in blue shirts kicking balls around in the local parks than there were 20, 10 or even five years ago. The numbers have evened up and it will continue that way as long as City give the impression that something special is brewing behind the glass doors of their village-sized training ground.
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