🖳 Part 6: Aston Villa (h)
✐John Bean was a staple in the Daily Express sports pages in the seventies. Although ostensibly a reporter on all things United, in those days the reporting was objective and honest, without the need for the partisan drool that some employ for their paymaster's clicks these days. This enabled him to report on City with no apparent sign of bias entering his crisp prose.
As a result, Bean spent much of the decade reporting on the ups and downs of City, as well as the other sides on the North west football beat.
He had cut his teeth at the Leek Post and the Evening Sentinel in Stoke, before moving on through the Daily Sketch, Daily Mirror and onto the Express, where this avid young reader caught up with his clean, enthusiastic style of writing.
The Manchester football scene in those days featured a number of larger than life characters, led by James Lawton amongst others, and, if we are to believe the words of ex-colleague David Walker, Bean was also near the forefront.
"Beano, as everyone knew him, was brilliant company. He did have his moments of intense eccentricity. Most revolved around him not possessing the greatest sense of direction but demanding that others followed the Bean instinct for getting to a destination somehow, if not by the easiest route...."
When in Rome, follow the Tiber...
"For the World Cup in Italy in 1990 when we were with the boys in green. Ireland reached the quarter-finals in Rome and the British press covering the team had three hire cars to travel into the media centre at the Olympic Stadium from our hotel.
On this particular day Beano teamed up with another fine man, now much lamented, Rob King. The journey should have taken 30 minutes. Perhaps with the traffic around
Rome it might have been an hour. King appeared first, FOUR hours after setting off. Clearly flustered Rob declared: “Don’t ask. Just don’t ask where we’ve been. The man’s mad.”
Enter Beano, who had a perfectly good explanation. “Bloody Rob. I told him to follow the Tiber and we’d be all right but he kept taking different turns. When in Rome, follow the Tiber. You can’t go wrong.”
Wherever we were in the world Beano would want to seek out a good restaurant, enjoy a glass or three of fine wine and then entertain us with his personal tales from the press box. Some from his early days on the Stoke Sentinel were both incredible and unrepeatable here! He was brilliant company. Unfailingly funny and invariably self-deprecating".
We find him here, reporting on a late season struggle for a City side needing points at home to Aston Villa. Malcolm Allison's second-coming to Maine Road is unravelling fast (he will be sacked the following October) and another season of tactical tomfoolery is coming to an end with City looking nervously over their shoulders.
Ironically, Bean had also been on the City beat the previous February when the two sides had met at Villa Park in a thrilling 2-2 draw. The two points, home and away, would help seal City's survival by season end, escaping in 17th place, two points clear of Everton, occupying the last safe place in the relegation fight.
Bean later followed the adventures of the Republic of Ireland under Jack Charlton, a fitting project for such a bon vivant, and was also the only one to notice Stuttgart had fielded an ineligible player v Leeds in the nascent Champions League, passing on the information to the club, who got a third play-off game as a result of their complaint, which was duly won at the Nou Camp.
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