WHEN WE WAS FAB
Forever Boys tells the bittersweet story of Manchester City’s glorious success and the inevitable comedown
“Sexual intercourse began,” Philip Larkin wrote in his poem Annus Mirabilis, “in nineteen sixty-three.” And every life became/A brilliant breaking of the bank, /A quite unlosable game. Larkin was writing about the hope of possibility; the sudden realisation that prospects could be boundless. Until—this being Larkin—reality intrudes. Larkin was a wordsmith of loss, a poet of the hidebound. He recognised the spirit of the ’60s while he abjured it for himself; a spirit, in England at least, that found its most enduring popular manifestation in music and football.
In 1966, George Best, that long-haired Northern Irish will o’ the wisp, scored two goals in a European Cup quarterfinal against Benfica. At the time, Benfica were two-time European champions, and had Eusébio da Silva Ferreira—the 1965 European Footballer of the Year—in their ranks. The match in question was being played at their home ground, the famous Stadium of Light. After the match, the Portuguese press named Best the “fifth Beatle”. The name stuck, and a new breed of working class heroes was born.
At the time, footballers were still considered “working class” folk. They were well paid, certainly, but not so far removed from the fans who stood on the stadium terraces. They were not inaccessible as they are today, with their super-cars and super-models, their already-extraordinary wages burnished by international TV audiences and endorsements for multinational corporations. There was a raucousness about English football in the ’60s and ’70s— on the pitch that is—which would transform into burgeoning hooliganism off it a decade later.
Back then, footballers’ money, their nascent celebrity, and what they did with it seemed more charming than obnoxious; theirs was an ‘ordinary outlandishness’. There was enough money in the game for the very best players to tool around in Jaguars or to open clothing boutiques and live in large houses, but not enough to cause resentment. First division players acted like they had won the lottery, their evident delight making it difficult for fans to begrudge them their good fortune. Today, a Premier League star earns in a week what a person on an average English salary might earn in a decade. This is not to say that players should not have been earning windfall sums in the ’60s or that they should be making less money now. Just that life was demonstrably more egalitarian in England in the ’60s and ’70s, and that a player like George Best, for all his celebrity, could still feel connected to his working class background.
Liberated from the dourness and the necessary sacrifices of the post-war years, the ’60s and ’70s zeitgeist
was apparent in the sudden glut of maverick footballers, of outsize personalities who made for compulsive viewing. In Forever Boys, James Lawton remembers the brilliant Manchester City team that picked up four trophies in three seasons, between 1967-68 and 1969-70. The team was managed by Joe Mercer, an ageing former star who had played for Everton and Arsenal, and coached by the young, charismatic Malcolm Allison. “Big Mal”, as Allison was called, imbued the team with his dash, his joie de vivre, and his appetite for hard work. Handsome and assured, he brought City out from under the shadow of Matt Busby’s Manchester United; the latter’s Best, Law, and Charlton for a time matched by City’s Bell, Summerbee and Lee.
In the 1967-68 season, United and City were the top two teams in England. That year, City won the League championship, while runners-up United went on to become the first English team to win the European Cup, beating Benfica at Wembley. In the following season, City won the FA Cup, and in the season after that, won both the League Cup and the Cup Winners’ Cup. It was not just about winning baubles, however; it was about arresting football, played with panache, skill and the toughness of a brutal era. But Lawton’s book is not a recounting of those glory years. It is a chronicle of loss, one that tries to ward off nostalgia; an effort to keep living in the present when the past offers so much to dwell upon. It is a chronicle of what happens after greatness has been achieved, when the years that follow cannot match the heat of the years now past. It is the story of what happens after the wax holding the wings together has melted.
Lawton begins the book at Malcom Allison’s funeral in 2010. It is an elegiac note—all of Allison’s students coming together to feel once again the spark that had bound them together. A few years later, Lawton, one of that country’s pre-eminent sportswriters, found himself left by the wayside by an industry that was cost-cutting itself to death. After a career that had seen him cover everything from prizefights to the Olympics, to golf majors and World Cups, after decades of near constant adrenaline-fuelled travel, his career was brought to an inglorious end by a phone call. Feeling irrelevant, Lawton recalled his start as a young reporter covering Mercer and Allison’s thrilling team.
“It was the thrill of starting off,” Lawton writes, “of believing that all was before us in the most invigorating of times which however gauche and naive they may now be labelled... seemed to have a vibrancy which had been reserved for us.” Forever Boys begins as a recollection of the self-absorbed nature of youth, that golden period when achievement is unleavened by failure and disappointment, and turns into a study of ageing, of learning to live with the past.
Few footballers do learn. Nowadays, the lucky ones can cry into their bank accounts. The even luckier ones move on to lucrative careers. However, many retired footballers end up searching for solace in drink, trying to numb the onset of depression that comes with the prospect of their hero stature dwindling into that of the dinner party bore. Some might find tragedy in Allison’s story of brief glory followed by the prolonged degradation of alcoholism and Alzheimer’s. But, as Lawton’s evocative book shows, those who were once glorious stay big; it’s the world that shrinks.