Maine Road glory
James Lawton on Man City
If a picture says a thousand words, the one depicting the great football man Joe Mercer on the stamp commemorating the centenary of his birth is, it has to be said, rather less than comprehensive.
It’s a fine study, let’s be sure about this, but it portrays most strikingly an ageing, distinguished player who seems to be contemplating the uncertainties that will surely come when the roar of the crowd and the rush of adrenaline are no more.
There is little to indicate the jauntiness of his best moments, the lop-sided smile that could fill any room, any arena, with great warmth or the quizzical, half amused, half-appalled gaze that came when confronted by the follies of youth.
He was certainly right, though, to be pensive before the camera. Joe Mercer is remembered as a glory of football management, an amusing, pragmatic and deeply philosophical convener of that sunburst of Manchester City which so illuminated the English game between 1968 and 1970.Yet behind the craggy grin there was also much pain, both before and after the brief but unforgettable ascendency of the team he made with his inspired but often ungovernable lieutenant Malcolm Allison.
Mercer was almost destroyed by his battles at Aston Villa and was still recovering from the ordeal when he took the City job, much against the wishes of his devoted wife Nora, and then at the height of City’s success he was, in effect, cut down by the ambition of Allison and the workings of the boardroom.
He was invited to become a figurehead but instead left for Coventry City and relative obscurity. “How do you hijack a successful football club in full flight?” he mused sadly.
You do it mainly by forgetting the lessons of the past – and a failure to understand the strengths that first brought triumph.
Many would say that today’s mega-rich City are beyond such education as they pursue, most pivotally at Anfield this month, their second Premier League title in three years. They operate in another age, one the veterans of the Mercer-Allison squad can only see in terms of surreal opulence, but they can hardly avoid an historic truth. It is that those old players produced a huge and enduring demonstration of how great teams seize their moments – and it is one which still shines as brightly as a sunlit dawn.
Compare, for example, the style of the City title-winning performance in 1968 (the second first division championship win in the history of the club) with the one which came 44 years later at the Etihad Stadium.
The first was a masterpiece of bravura – a thrilling, unstoppable assault on the high ground. The second was a harrowing walk along the precipice of shocking anti-climax, redeemed only by the astonishing spirit and resilience of Sergio Aguero. A City which had cost its Arab owners the best part of a billion pounds, laboured to beat a doomed Queen’s Park Rangers.
One of the heroes of that first triumph, on a spring day at Newcastle, Francis Lee, still sees it as a near perfect expression of a football team’s determination to fulfill an ambition.
“As a team we hadn’t been together for so long,” says Lee, “but we had quickly benefitted from a perfect chemistry. It existed between Joe and Malcolm and it spread through the dressing room like wildfire.We all understood precisely what we had to do.”
City’s situation then was as it is now. They controlled their own destiny; to win a certain number of games, was to carry off the great prize. Back in the spring of ’68 City had to go to Tottenham and then Newcastle and win both games and if they did this the crusade was complete.
At White Hart Lane they were rampant. All of Allison’s style suffused the performance. City were, by some distance, the fittest team in the land and that brought terrible havoc to the confidence of one of the greatest players of the era, the barrel-chested Dave Mackay of Scotland.
Allison and Mercer agreed that to undermine Mackay was to tear away the heart of Spurs. They also concluded that the best way of doing this was to release Colin Bell into a torrent of running. If City were indeed the fittest team in the land, one which had waxed so strongly with new levels of speed and stamina training imposed by world class-athletes like Derek Ibbotson and Danny Herman and Joe Lancaster, unquestionably Bell was the supreme product. His young club-mate Tommy Booth recalls, “I quickly formed the impression that Belly hadn’t
come down from the North-East but from a different planet. After a running session we were all awash with sweat but you wouldn’t see a bead on him. His pulse rate was unbelievable.”
Allison, famously, had christened Bell Nijinsky, not after the mad dancer but the great Derby winner. Some saw this as a typically blatant attempt by Allison to boost the self-belief of players who had yet to establish unimpeachable credentials. But as time sped on, increasingly it had to be seen as a simple statement of physiological fact.
If anyone had lingering doubts about this they were surely shattered at the penultimate stage of the title challenge. Bell ran at the heart of Spurs, which is to say Mackay, and the consequences could hardly have been more dramatic. For the first time in a superb career Mackay had to ask himself if he still had a place at the top of the game.
On the Monday morning after City’s 3-1 victory Mackay went to see his manager Bill Nicholson to say that he thought it was probably time to call it a day. As it developed, Brian Clough at Derby saw a leadership role for the old warrior in an impressively emerging team. Still, no-one needed to tell Mackay the ageing gunfighter that he had been unable to disguise the fact that he was no longer so quick on the draw.
City had given some notice of their destructive powers at a frozen Maine Road earlier in the season. In those days of skeletal television coverage, City were making their one appearance on national television on the BBC’s Match of the Day. Commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme introduced City “as the most exciting team in England,” and had no reason to regret his enthusiasm despite an early strike by Jimmy Greaves. It was soon clear enough that the great scorer was on this occasion the rare author of a futile gesture.
Helped by their captain Tony Book’s suggestion that boot studs should be modified, City ransacked any Spurs sense of wellbeing. After a 4-1 thrashing acclaimed as the ‘Ballet on Ice’ – and a performance which earned City an award for the season’s most outstanding piece of entertainment – one Spurs player said, “It was extraordinary. City moved like Olympic skaters while we fell around like clowns on a skid-patch.”
The unpalatable truth for Spurs was that the difference between the teams ran rather deeper than possession of the niftier footwear. City skated no less majestically on the turf of White Hart Lane and then turned their faces to Newcastle.
If City won they were beyond challenge. “We didn’t really have any doubts about the outcome,” Lee remembers. “It was true that we allowed Newcastle back into the game a few times but we had the belief that whatever they did we could go one better and so it was – a 4-3 win which might have had a nervy ending but in many ways was something of a slaughter.
“The basis was the confidence that had been fed into us over the season.We had good results and the harder we trained the more we believed in Malcolm’s methods. It is very easy to doubt yourself in professional football – and I say this as someone who probably had more confidence in himself than most. I was scoring a lot of goals as a kid at Bolton and it’s true that when Mal talked with me one night at the social club there, and said that if I came to City he would make me a great player, I did say,‘Well, thank you very much but I don’t think I’m too bad right now.’ It’s also right that when he left I turned to some companions and said,‘What an arrogant bastard.’ However, the fact was that we really hit it off and I was delighted when I finished up at City.
“The thing I remember most about coming away from Newcastle was the sense that we didn’t really know how to celebrate winning something so significant. The fact was that none of us had won a bloody thing. We stopped on the road and got some beer and sang some songs, but the truth was we were all a bit numb. The only thing we knew for sure was that we had turned into a very good team indeed.”
What they had for a little while, and the reality of it became increasingly haunting as the Mercer-Allison relationship fractured irreparably, was the certainty that what they were doing was right. Says Lee,“Malcolm was full of theory and brilliance, but he could come out with some barmy stuff as well, and when he did Joe was always around to offer him a little bit of protection – from himself as much as anybody.
“For some time we were aware that the partnership was breaking down but that didn’t make us less sad when it happened.”
In three years City won four trophies, the title, the FA Cup, the League Cup and the European Cup-Winners Cup and when the last one came, on a rain-scoured night in the old Prater Stadium in Vienna against the tough Polish team Gornik, Allison was found on his hotel bedroom balcony puffing on a giant cigar while looking across a great swathe of historic parkland.“I feel like Napoleon this morning,” he declared.
Of course we know what happened to Napoleon’s empire. It was the battle of Waterloo and as Mercer retreated to Coventry Allison’s emperor’s crown was seen to be askew at ever decreasing intervals.
“What you couldn’t avoid,” Lee adds,“was the fact that while Mal was a brilliant coach, the best I have ever seen by some distance, he was really never cut out to be a manager. He couldn’t play the boardroom games, he didn’t understand how the system worked. Joe understood it quite naturally.”
With Mercer’s influence dwindling, Allison made the mistake which many will
always believe was the most damaging of all in his loss of career momentum. It was not enough for him that City appeared to be cruising to a second title early in 1972. He wanted an extra flourish beyond the hardedged brilliance of men like Bell, Lee and Mike Summerbee. So he signed Rodney Marsh, the extravagantly gifted Queen’s Park Rangers forward who had long been celebrated as the Sheikh of Shepherd’s Bush.
“Rodney will give us something that Georgie Best gives United – he will give us a touch of glamour.” It was, he conceded with much sadness later, a betrayal of his own best values. The problem was that Marsh, an engaging character and sublimely skilful when at the top of his game, simply wasn’t fit. He had been becalmed by injury and if this hadn’t been the case he would still have faced huge adjustments while establishing himself in the City regime.
Allison rushed him into the team, at the expense of the young but superbly developing Tony Towers, with disastrous consequences. City surrendered their lead and, with ultimate irony, beat the new champions Derby County on the last day of the season.
Allison later agreed that the Marsh signing was the biggest mistake of his career.
But then even his heaviest critics had to say that if his fall was profound the strongest of his work would never be obscured by the charge of excessive vanity.
It was, the saddened Mercer was the first to concur, a stunning ability to draw the best out of a group of footballers. Still it burns in the memory and if Allison’s beautifully sculpted face is unlikely to appear on a stamp, nor will his picture ever be turned to the wall. Not, at least, by anyone who knew those days of football thunder.