MALCOLM ALLISON'S COACHING PANEL

Throughout 1969 and1970, Charles Buchan's Football Monthly Magazine decided to run a series of half page tactics and coaching tips from City head coach Malcolm Allison. He had, after all, been responsible for a City side that had climbed out of the second division in 1965-66, becoming serial winners just two years after.

Allison, schooled in the art of innovation and out of the box thinking thanks to a predilection for the Hungarian team of the 50s that knocked spots off England at Wembley, produced for the magazine in a long running series, tips for fitness, strength, diet, movement, technique and many other facets that your average 1970s trainer had not yet had the time to dream up.

Ahead of his time was a phrase often tied to Allison, as it was somewhat ironically to Arsene Wenger when he alighted in the Premier League in 1995. Wenger indeed was a deep thinker, but as far as bringing innovative change to the English game was concerned, many of his tricks had been pioneered by Allison some twenty years before.

While some of the articles appear endearingly outdated (everyone and his dog now encourage high-fibre diets and regular weight training), many are insightful and, taken in the context of England's then close adherence to a kick and rush, thud and blunder approach to the game, continue to show up Allison's blue sky sky blue thinking in a positive light.

Here he talks about a problem still prevalent in the game today, building up strength without overstraining the body. In the light of the rash of injuries at Anfield this season, where a regime of intense high pressure, high speed football has been advocated by Jurgen Klopp in recent seasons, the ex-City coach's thoughts seem prescient.

A RETURN TO BUDAPEST, BIG MAL'S SPIRITUAL HOME

Allison outside Monchengladbach's old Bökelbergstadion before the 1979 UEFA Cup tie. 

🏆UEFA's edict earlier this week that the Manchester City-Borussia
Monchengladbach Champions League round of 16 first leg tie should take place in Budapest raised interesting ghosts from the past.

That the tie will take place in the Puskas Arena is apt for a number of reasons and they all involve ex-City supremo Malcolm Allison.

For it was Hungary, and Budapest in particular, and Puskas even more particularly, that pointed the way for the young Allison as he set out to become one of the world game's most innovative thinkers. Having served in the army in Austria and seen the Hungarians train there whilst on tour, Allison was ultra keen to be at Wembley in November 1953 to see the Hungarian national side take on England. 

Allison made it to North London that day, along with 105,000 other souls, convinced as they were that England's place as world leaders of the game was not in doubt. Allison had other ideas, however. What the huge crowd witnessed will have surprised them, but not the old West Ham centre half Allison. Having watched Puskas and his team mates Nandor Hidegkuti, Sandor Kocsis and Zoltan Czibor train, he was well aware of what was to come and was certain the self-assured England players were about to come a cropper.

As they warmed up for the Wembley clash, one of Allison's companions (possibly future coach Jimmy Andrews) was moved to laugh at Puskas, whose rotund figure made him look an unlikely sportsman for the occasion. With his shorts pulled high on his belly, he looked for all the world like an overweight spectator who had slipped onto the pitch ahead of the police.

Minutes later Allison's companions had stopped laughing, as Puskas proceeded to trap balls pinged at him at all heights with the ease of a master and to zip them back across the turf with alarming accuracy, pace and spin. This he continued to do during a game since made famous as the moment English haughtiness was given the ice bucket treatment. Hungary won the game 6-3 and a new era of self doubt entered the English national team, a paralysis which, to some, has never properly left it.

It was not just the speed of movement and accuracy of shooting that Allison had noticed, but the ever-changing formation, the easy switching of positions, even the jauntily cut shorts that allowed more movement around the thighs. Everything, from pre match diet, to warm up routine to stylized kit had been adapted to give the visitors an advantage.

Allison would introduce these measures to his City squad as they grew from second division ignominy to a side capable of winning four trophies in three years. His interpretation of what these avant-garde football folk from the East of Europe were doing formed the basis of City’s invigorating passing game that sometimes seemed light years ahead of what other teams were attempting to come up with at the time in the prosaic surroundings of the English First Division.

When his City side was drawn to play the Hungarians of Honved in the 1970 edition of the Cup Winners' Cup at the end of this glorious period of trophy-hunting, there was a pleasant surprise waiting for the City coach in Budapest on the occasion of the first leg. 

City’s elegant, accomplished football won them the game easily, despite a close looking 1-0 scoreline. They had been a joy to watch and had vindicated their coach’s adherence, all those years ago, to the virtues of good passing and faultless technique that he had witnessed from Hungary’s national team players. After the match, a Honved official approached Allison to congratulate him for “the best football we have seen from an English side in our country”.

Allison was then escorted to a little restaurant where Puskas’s infamous paunch was said to have been fostered in the early days and to a little house on a back street of the capital with a red chimney pot where the master of Hungarian football had grown up. Despite his defection to Spain, the place had remained a shrine of Hungarian football, filled with trinkets and memorabilia from the great man's career.

Hidegkuti scores Hungary's sixth and final goal at Wembley in 1953.

Allison was enchanted by this treatment and was later moved to say  “I was entranced by the stories they told me. I could see elements of what they were telling me that were totally alien to English football and its coaching methods.” 

At the end of the same decade (1979), Allison's second spell as City manager was coming to a rather less auspicious close, when City were drawn against Borussia Monchengladbach in the UEFA Cup. It would be a tie thrown to the wind by the coach's by now obsessive tinkering. Having disposed of the European experience of Asa Hartford, Brian Kidd  and their ilk, Allison blooded eighteen year old Nicky Reid and briefed him to mark European Footballer of the Year Allan Simonsen. The writing was on the wall after a 1-1 first leg draw at Maine Road and City left the competition in the return at the Bokelberg with their tales firmly between their legs. Reid acquitted himself well enough but it had not been the occasion for experiments.  

City had overcome FC Twente, Standard Liege and, more famously, AC Milan on their way to the quarter finals before Allison's return to the club and it would be nearly 25 years before they played in Europe again. 

For Allison, Gladbach represented his last hurrah with City in Europe and Budapest represented the bedrock to his opening gambit as a football coach. Both ends of his sparkling, never-dull career are thus dovetailed beautifully by UEFA's decision to house the first leg of this enthralling tie in the Hungarian capital.

    

REDEMPTION AND RESURRECTION

This article first appeared (in sanitized form!) in the Irish Examiner on Monday 8th February 2021 

This means more: Gundogan trips the light fantastic

The filmscape for Manchester City’s 128-year history of grim and largely inefficient scrabbling at Anfield has long resembled a particularly bleak scene from a Fritz Lang opus. Inert bodies scattered hither and thither, scores of bent, leafless trees and the clear sound of thousands of people sobbing simultaneously. Was his metaphorical depiction of this painful journey in While the City Sleeps about to undergo a makeover, a City awakening at last?

Myriad shades of grey and puce are enveloped by the unremitting shadows of the unforgiving struggle. What blobs of light can be detected (1981, 2003), they are such tiny pinpricks in the unrelenting gloom as to represent the aftereffects of an old man grinding black pepper onto the surface of the moon from a distance of two kilometres.

City at Anfield has been an inexorable process of decay for many decades, the slow stiffening of limbs (my, what stiff legs you have!), the gradual emptying of the intestines (Oh my goodness, I’m not sure that feels any better) and the draining of blood towards the gravitational low point (I’m afraid I feel a little faint), until all life has left the body and it stiffens to a crisp.

So, let there be light! Redemption! Resurrection! Rise up and convert your chances at the Anfield Road end!

Liverpool, themselves ground down to minute specks themselves by the threefold cogs of injury ill fortune, Herr Klopp’s relentless regime of Gegenpressing and City’s full board Covid-19 staycation in January, were surely there for the taking at last. Pep’s great Mancunian juggernaut, with its tractor tyres and its full tank of diesel, came charging down the East Lancs Road convinced of its moment in time, its place in history, with a thirteen-win run making them look far bigger than they actually are. The Great Avengers, the Righters of Wrongs, the Glory Boys.

The target in sight? A glorious, sweat-stained third win at Anfield since 1981, even depleted as they were by the absence of dual talismen Sergio Aguero and Kevin de Bruyne (who knew amongst the white noise about other absent friends?). City, shorn of the prowess that has produced 200 goal involvements in the last 5 seasons, began cordially and, when offered the opportunity to atone for two penalty misses against Liverpool in the last four matches, they missed again, Ilkay Gundogan following Riyad Mahrez and De Bruyne with his own Diana Ross impersonation.

Hark, though, the clarion call sounding from high on the roof, next to where City’s first half penalty ball still nestled. Brave minds needed, strong legs and nerves of steel. Apply within to Senor Josep Guardiola. The little German, fresh from the double blow of penalty disaster and a second minute reducer from the otherwise peripheral Thiago Alcantara (this was his most meaningful contribution to the game), stormed back into control. Alongside, Bernardo Silva chasing everything down like a Jack Russell on amphetamines, Phil Foden, with the elegance and drive of the child of an 800 metre Olympic champion and Nadia Comaneci, and even little Zinchenko muscling into things with his faultless first touch down the left.

The focus may in time fall on the part played by a hapless Alisson, dinking his way into the assists column with some second half brain clouding, but let nobody forget that it was his counterpart at the other end starting the match with a golden giveaway of his own. The vital difference was the hunger of the bodies chasing those loose balls down. City’s indefatigable chasing outshone Liverpool’s half pace response with Bernardo’s little legs audibly whirring as if driven by some unseen turbine behind the stands.

You could hear other things too in the now customary empty ground. Herr Klopp’s teeth gnashing together, Michael Oliver’s stomach rumbling when finally offered an opportunity to give Liverpool a penalty (he had already infamously offered Leicester three at the Etihad earlier this season) after Salah’s starburst arms persuaded him the gentle touch of Dias was actually the hug of a murderer. A peeping sound was also to be heard, the air escaping from Liverpool’s high-pressure century-old record of massaging City gently back through those Shankly Gates empty-handed. Even the canned crowd sound had been finally and irrevocably switched to Blue Moon for the momentous last act.

Cue bright light, cue the sound of gleeful cheering, cue much cavorting about. Even Fritz Lang would have understood.

 

                            _{PHIL FODEN comes of age.....again.}