Friday, April 19, 2019
Thursday, April 4, 2019
THE ROCK-STREWN ROAD TO DAMNATION
It might be time for a few people to make their mind up about Manchester City and its fans.
I will first own up to a slight bias. I have followed the club since the mid-70s, through thin times and thinner times right through to times so thin, if they stood sideways on, you wouldn't have noticed them at all. Home defeats to Port Vale and Bury, away embarrassments at Stockport and Crewe that it is no longer particularly cool to mention.
There's a joke about how many City fans claim to have been at York, for a third division fixture that also went tits up (everything went tits up between 1995 and the turn of the century). If you're a serious Blue these days, you don't mention these games in earnest. They are a self-perpetuating joke, buried deep and out of the way, because we have moved on from that.
We don't want to be seen to be harking on about Macclesfield's muddy meadows and Lincoln's abysmal away end, for fear of it looking like a badge of honour, the grim sacrifice we made. There's the ripped up season ticket book thrown at manager Frank Clark during the home defeat to Bury. The gallows humour as we beat Stoke 5-2 on their own patch, but still descended to the third tier of professional football because Port Vale and Portsmouth had both managed improbable away wins. There were the Ipswich fans (Ipswich fans!) with the sheet stating "You are the weakest link. Goodbye." as we dropped again. Ipswich, I ask you. And now there are Huddersfield and Burnley fans, whose grounds we packed out in the 80s and 90s, when times were bad, with away followings as big as anything the locals had seen, asking "where were we when we were shit?". Not a hint of irony. Not one hint.
But what exactly have we moved on to?
I can well remember the not so long ago day when almost every neutral harboured a soft spot for City, a soft focus version of the calamity that is the modern Newcastle United: dreadful owner, terrible buys, players who couldn't care less and results that made your hair fall out. Only Newcastle are still in there, just about, still top division, still competing in a flabby sort of way. City descended from the top flight in truly ignominious circumstances, blown southwards after protecting a 2-2 draw with Liverpool that served for nothing at all, bar relegation. The then manager Alan Ball, a small man with a squeaky voice who was almost totally side-tracked by an obsession for himself in an England 1966 World Cup shirt, continued a putrefaction that had set in years before. If fish rot from the head, City had been smelling a bit off from the seventies onwards, when Peter Swales, an Altrincham lothario sporting Cuban heels and combover, took control of the board in a low key coup d'etat.
Swales was a kind of electrical goods tsar from the southern suburbs. He had City at heart, but he was yet another Man in Football, who was extremely busy misjudging his own self-importance.
City's travails after this are well documented. Painful, colourful, blurred but ultimately with a happy ending. We all have the bruises to prove it. The happy ending sees the club in the fortuitous position of having been bought out by the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi. If you had mentioned this as a likelihood in the Parkside Pub in the nineties, you would have found yourself airborne without a window being opened first to allow free passage to the great Moss Side outdoors. It was a surreal development to the point of melting clocks bearing the face of Barry Conlon.
Things have trundled along pretty well since then. City's FA Cup semi-final date with Brighton at Wembley this weekend will be their 16th in the last nine years. And herein lies a bit of a problem.
Suddenly these things of beauty and charm that used to be so far from our reach that we could only dream what they might be like, are appearing at the rate of at least one a season. The Manchester City of Neil Heaney and Barry Silkman, of Phil Neal and the Whitely brothers, is suddenly awash with high fliers. Big match after big match and each one adorned with some of the most glittering stars in the modern game. Looking at the City bench during the home win over Cardiff - so routine, you felt the players could perhaps have played with their arms strapped to their sides or even wearing some kind of semi-permanent blindfold - and your eyes fell on a well-groomed rank of super-athletes that fair made the eyes water: Kyle Walker, Vincent Kompany, Ilkay Gundogan, David Silva and Bernardo Silva. Crumbs, what happened to Paul Sugrue and Dave Wiffill?.
This, then, is the new City: fabulously well-endowed and gunning for an unprecedented quadruple of League Cup, FA Cup, Premier League and, whisper it gently, Champions League too.
And this is where people have to make their minds up about this club that has dared to be lucky and dared to soar with the eagles. Social media was just a pimply youth when City's demise began, but you cannot go anywhere without its shrill call today. The empty seats commandos are having their field day. City's extended stadium now shows one or two vacancies in certain less-heralded fixtures. Yet, when the club plays away, the invariably packed away enclosure is treated to a weekly dose of "where were you when you were shit?" from the home support.
They can't all be right. You cannot have it both ways.
The answer to the last question appears to be "many people". Plus Dean Saunders, whose grasp on logic and the ins and outs of trying to survive in these straitened times is at best a touch weak. Dean is the type who thinks "500 pounds to see Tom Jones" is something you should do three times in the week, if they were to be his last concerts. Where you grab the 1500 big ones from is another matter and how you gather yourself to go again the following week, as football fans do, is probably best left to larger intellects to look into. Dean's brain works in a different medium; it only stretches so far and the fuzzy velvet of Talksport's microphones are probably - if truth be told - already a throwaway homily or two further than he should have gone.
What might aid Dean, though, and Beccy from Huyton and Dan from Watford and Dwayne from Sutton in their pursuit of inner calm, is a passing knowledge of our great sport's history. For, the very commodity City are said not to have, is the one thing coming out of the club's ears. For good or for bad (and here comes the other argument), City have been around for a long time, many of City's fans have too, in greater numbers in fact than any other top flight club today.
It is perhaps symptomatic of a society that has spawned the foot soldiers of Brexit that so little respect is afforded. Football's tribal nature has always begot thundering one-eyed partisans, but we now have vehicles to spread this nonsense far and wide. As it travels, like a great off-white snowball, the untruths and bullshit roll with it, until the whole colossus is the size of a cathedral.
But it's not difficult if you think about it.
You do the maths. You look up where City's bedrock support hails from. You ask yourself why Liverpool and Manchester United have such swathes of international support. You fathom out why Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham can put prices higher than a medium-sized mortgage and still attract punters. You ask yourself why City fans, brought up on luke warm porridge and bacon butties, boo the gold-livery prawns of the Champions League You check how large City's crowds have been from the year dot. You take a glimpse at all those sepia tinted images of crammed grounds from the 20s and 30 and 40s when none of us were alive but Manchester City were registering record crowds. You find the answer to why, the worse City got in those fiendish 90s, the more fans followed them. You figure it out. And when you have, come back and we'll have a proper grown-up chat about it all.
I will first own up to a slight bias. I have followed the club since the mid-70s, through thin times and thinner times right through to times so thin, if they stood sideways on, you wouldn't have noticed them at all. Home defeats to Port Vale and Bury, away embarrassments at Stockport and Crewe that it is no longer particularly cool to mention.
There's a joke about how many City fans claim to have been at York, for a third division fixture that also went tits up (everything went tits up between 1995 and the turn of the century). If you're a serious Blue these days, you don't mention these games in earnest. They are a self-perpetuating joke, buried deep and out of the way, because we have moved on from that.
We don't want to be seen to be harking on about Macclesfield's muddy meadows and Lincoln's abysmal away end, for fear of it looking like a badge of honour, the grim sacrifice we made. There's the ripped up season ticket book thrown at manager Frank Clark during the home defeat to Bury. The gallows humour as we beat Stoke 5-2 on their own patch, but still descended to the third tier of professional football because Port Vale and Portsmouth had both managed improbable away wins. There were the Ipswich fans (Ipswich fans!) with the sheet stating "You are the weakest link. Goodbye." as we dropped again. Ipswich, I ask you. And now there are Huddersfield and Burnley fans, whose grounds we packed out in the 80s and 90s, when times were bad, with away followings as big as anything the locals had seen, asking "where were we when we were shit?". Not a hint of irony. Not one hint.
But what exactly have we moved on to?
I can well remember the not so long ago day when almost every neutral harboured a soft spot for City, a soft focus version of the calamity that is the modern Newcastle United: dreadful owner, terrible buys, players who couldn't care less and results that made your hair fall out. Only Newcastle are still in there, just about, still top division, still competing in a flabby sort of way. City descended from the top flight in truly ignominious circumstances, blown southwards after protecting a 2-2 draw with Liverpool that served for nothing at all, bar relegation. The then manager Alan Ball, a small man with a squeaky voice who was almost totally side-tracked by an obsession for himself in an England 1966 World Cup shirt, continued a putrefaction that had set in years before. If fish rot from the head, City had been smelling a bit off from the seventies onwards, when Peter Swales, an Altrincham lothario sporting Cuban heels and combover, took control of the board in a low key coup d'etat.
Swales was a kind of electrical goods tsar from the southern suburbs. He had City at heart, but he was yet another Man in Football, who was extremely busy misjudging his own self-importance.
City's travails after this are well documented. Painful, colourful, blurred but ultimately with a happy ending. We all have the bruises to prove it. The happy ending sees the club in the fortuitous position of having been bought out by the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi. If you had mentioned this as a likelihood in the Parkside Pub in the nineties, you would have found yourself airborne without a window being opened first to allow free passage to the great Moss Side outdoors. It was a surreal development to the point of melting clocks bearing the face of Barry Conlon.
Things have trundled along pretty well since then. City's FA Cup semi-final date with Brighton at Wembley this weekend will be their 16th in the last nine years. And herein lies a bit of a problem.
Suddenly these things of beauty and charm that used to be so far from our reach that we could only dream what they might be like, are appearing at the rate of at least one a season. The Manchester City of Neil Heaney and Barry Silkman, of Phil Neal and the Whitely brothers, is suddenly awash with high fliers. Big match after big match and each one adorned with some of the most glittering stars in the modern game. Looking at the City bench during the home win over Cardiff - so routine, you felt the players could perhaps have played with their arms strapped to their sides or even wearing some kind of semi-permanent blindfold - and your eyes fell on a well-groomed rank of super-athletes that fair made the eyes water: Kyle Walker, Vincent Kompany, Ilkay Gundogan, David Silva and Bernardo Silva. Crumbs, what happened to Paul Sugrue and Dave Wiffill?.
This, then, is the new City: fabulously well-endowed and gunning for an unprecedented quadruple of League Cup, FA Cup, Premier League and, whisper it gently, Champions League too.
And this is where people have to make their minds up about this club that has dared to be lucky and dared to soar with the eagles. Social media was just a pimply youth when City's demise began, but you cannot go anywhere without its shrill call today. The empty seats commandos are having their field day. City's extended stadium now shows one or two vacancies in certain less-heralded fixtures. Yet, when the club plays away, the invariably packed away enclosure is treated to a weekly dose of "where were you when you were shit?" from the home support.
They can't all be right. You cannot have it both ways.
The answer to the last question appears to be "many people". Plus Dean Saunders, whose grasp on logic and the ins and outs of trying to survive in these straitened times is at best a touch weak. Dean is the type who thinks "500 pounds to see Tom Jones" is something you should do three times in the week, if they were to be his last concerts. Where you grab the 1500 big ones from is another matter and how you gather yourself to go again the following week, as football fans do, is probably best left to larger intellects to look into. Dean's brain works in a different medium; it only stretches so far and the fuzzy velvet of Talksport's microphones are probably - if truth be told - already a throwaway homily or two further than he should have gone.
What might aid Dean, though, and Beccy from Huyton and Dan from Watford and Dwayne from Sutton in their pursuit of inner calm, is a passing knowledge of our great sport's history. For, the very commodity City are said not to have, is the one thing coming out of the club's ears. For good or for bad (and here comes the other argument), City have been around for a long time, many of City's fans have too, in greater numbers in fact than any other top flight club today.
It is perhaps symptomatic of a society that has spawned the foot soldiers of Brexit that so little respect is afforded. Football's tribal nature has always begot thundering one-eyed partisans, but we now have vehicles to spread this nonsense far and wide. As it travels, like a great off-white snowball, the untruths and bullshit roll with it, until the whole colossus is the size of a cathedral.
But it's not difficult if you think about it.
You do the maths. You look up where City's bedrock support hails from. You ask yourself why Liverpool and Manchester United have such swathes of international support. You fathom out why Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham can put prices higher than a medium-sized mortgage and still attract punters. You ask yourself why City fans, brought up on luke warm porridge and bacon butties, boo the gold-livery prawns of the Champions League You check how large City's crowds have been from the year dot. You take a glimpse at all those sepia tinted images of crammed grounds from the 20s and 30 and 40s when none of us were alive but Manchester City were registering record crowds. You find the answer to why, the worse City got in those fiendish 90s, the more fans followed them. You figure it out. And when you have, come back and we'll have a proper grown-up chat about it all.
Wednesday, April 3, 2019
DISPATCHES FROM THE OTHER SIDE 19
3rd April 2019 – “Please be ‘Spursy’, Spurs”.
Those were the four words I wrote in the last instalment
of this bias-fuelled take on what continues to be a thrilling Premier League
title race. And my God Tottenham came up trumps. Liverpool have been
magnificent this season, but recent weeks have seen dominant all-round performances
replaced with shaky, unconvincing displays.
Every great team experiences such periods, so it is
nothing to be ashamed of. The difference is that Reds sides of the past would
have crumbled a long time ago now. This group of players are the most
mentally resolute at Anfield in 30 years, though, led by a special manager in
Jurgen Klopp.
The Spurs game was another harrowing experience, in
a match Liverpool did not deserve to win. Mauricio Pochettino’s side have
consistently been the best side to visit Anfield in the last two or three
seasons and they impressed again.
Liverpool had a chance to put Spurs to bed after
Roberto Firmino’s opener, but as was the case against Leicester and West Ham
recently, they got sloppy and allowed their opponents to equalise.
Then there was the Moussa Sissoko moment - an
incident that drew comparisons with Eidur Gudjohnsen’s last-gasp miss in the
2005 Champions League semi-final second leg. It could be equally as big come
May. As the midfielder raced through, images of Willian tapping into an empty
net in 2014 came flooding back, and the dream was on the cusp of dying. Then
Virgil van Dijk decided to show why he is the world’s best defender, closing
off the space to Son Heung-min and forcing Sissoko into a shot with his
weaker left foot, before he blazed over.
If that had been Joel Matip, Dejan Lovren or most
other mere mortal centre-backs, Liverpool would have conceded, but Van Dijk
is a true colossus. He didn’t panic, gambled on Sissoko missing and the Reds
stayed alive. The last-minute own goal that followed was one of those ‘name is on the trophy’ moments for neutrals
watching on, but I have experienced far too much heartbreak to ever be
thinking that, Rival fans will be saying it is written in the stars that
Liverpool will
be crowned champions in May - nice try with the reverse
psychology, lads - but we’re not stupid. People were saying exactly the same thing in 2014 and during last season’s
Champions League run. Look how they both cruelly panned out.
I mentioned last time that luck was going to play a
pivotal role in the title race and there is no doubting that Liverpool
benefited from it against Spurs, and have done numerous times this season. Hugo
Lloris’ mistake can sit alongside the goalkeeping howlers produced by Jordan Pickford
and Julian Speroni at the Kop end, and Toby Alderweireld’s subsequent own
goal was a hugely beneficial moment. As stated previously, though, I
firmly believe Liverpool are due some luck in a title race, biased though
that may sound.
Let’s not kid ourselves about them having all the
luck, though. Winning breeds hate, which is why so many are being left
infuriated by ‘Lucky Liverpool’, but they have experienced plenty of misfortunate
as well. Examples include: the ball being millimetres from crossing the lines
against Man City, Vincent Kompany avoiding a red card in the same game and
Naby Keita not winning a penalty late on against Leicester. I could go on.
Have the Reds been lucky? Absolutely. Is it the key
to their title charge? Not in the slightest. If you think that, take up
rugby. I’ve spent an awfully long time speaking about my own team when I
should really be focusing on City, but everything is a little low-key and
frustratingly easy for them at present.
Their fixtures seem eternally easy, there are no
dramas whatsoever and they are serenely getting closer to achieving what
would be the most remarkable of quadruples. I can’t remember the last City
game I watched with any great interest, simply because their matches have
been so routine and lacking in drama. The Fulham game followed a pattern that
has become the norm this season: gift City an early goal and let them saunter
through the rest of proceedings.
This is all one giant compliment to Pep Guardiola’s
men, of course, who make everything look so ridiculously straightforward and
barely even look like they are in a pulsating title battle currently. Bernardo
Silva yet again proved to be an inspiration, and while Sergio Aguero and
Raheem Sterling have been superb all season, the Portuguese has been the main
man for me. He is the one I fear - the one who will keep producing big
moments when others around him are
potentially flagging. What a footballer he is.
It is easy to put a pessimistic stance on any of the
Reds’ remaining games, but the trip to St Mary’s does look awkward. It is a
Friday night game with the whole country watching, and the home crowd will be
fired up, particularly as they loathe Liverpool for signing all their best
players in recent years. Saints have also won their last two games and remain
in need of points. Get through that and it will be another significant three
points for Klopp’s men, ahead of what becomes a far more taxing run for City.
They are in FA Cup semi-final action this weekend,
which will likely be another one-sided win over Brighton - I will be more
engrossed in the Grand National, summing up what the cup has become to me
these days. We will reconvene next week, with the mouthwatering Champions
League quarter-finals taking
place and City’s legs and resolve finally set to be
tested.in those the final eight games
But for now, thanks for being Spursy,
Spurs…
-
Henry Jackson
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