United's boss once regarded Manchester City as an afterthought, but not any more, writes DANIEL TAYLOR
ANDY MORRISON tells a story about the old Manchester City that in its own small way demonstrates what a difference there is between the club we see now and what they used to represent back in the days when the paint was peeling, the curtains trembled and a tired old club took a good long look at Nowheresville.
Morrison was captain of the team that helped City clamber out of the third tier in 1999, built like a nightclub bouncer and often acting like one, too. He was a cult hero and when he was released from his contract in 2002 he was invited on the pitch to wave goodbye to the crowd before a match against Crystal Palace. He took his son, Arron, and daughter, Brooke. City filmed the moment so he could have a DVD of the memories and Morrison’s voice cracked with emotion as he was passed the microphone.
A few weeks later he sat down to watch it for the first time. Except when he pressed play it was not himself he could see. He could hear his speech but the camera was focused on the Palace players warming up. One guy, in particular: black, skinny, cropped hair, tramlines shaven into his eyebrows. A decade on Morrison can just about laugh about it now. “If Clinton Morrison ever wants a DVD of himself doing keepie-ups, I’m your man.”
Typical City, as we used to say back in the days when it was Macclesfield, not Manchester United, who counted as the local derby and Alex Ferguson and his players were almost a taboo subject. “Staff at Maine Road seldom mention Manchester’s other team these days,” Mark Hodkinson wrote in Blue Moon, his account of City’s tumultuous 1998-99 season through the puddles and potholes of third-tier football. “Both literally and metaphorically, they accept that United are in a different league.” City were failure, debt and Joy Division pessimism. United were glory, prestige and football, bloody hell.
What we have now, with City taking on United tonight with the championship potentially at stake, is so different that one wonders whether the next generation of City supporters will ever truly appreciate what it was like back in the days when the club were so skint the players had to pay for their own boots.
The club of Pollock, Dibble and Brannan has become the stable of Silva, Aguero and Tevez. Roberto Mancini’s press conference on Saturday was so packed he suggested they should have sold tickets. There were questions from Italy, Sweden and Canada.
A decade ago it was two or three of us sitting in Joe Royle’s office in Platt Lane while a regular group of drunks used to congregate on the corner and shout abuse at the players through the fencing. Royle had a drinks coaster in the design of a panic button. “Press here,” it said.
Ferguson largely regarded City as an afterthought in those days. “Not any longer,” Mancini responded during one conversation spent trying to explain how much Ferguson used to enjoy making fun at their expense. Like the first few weeks of the City of Manchester Stadium when Ferguson leant back in his chair and asked a roomful of football writers what it was like at “the Temple of Doom”. Or the times when Paul Hince, an old-school Mancunian who was on City’s books in the 1960s, turned up at press conferences in his role as chief sports writer of the Manchester Evening News. Ferguson would regularly rebut questions by asking whether Hince was all right, did he need some paracetamol, should he call a psychiatrist. You get the idea.
The jokes have been replaced by a new sense of respect now, even if MUTV’s presenters do refer to City as “noisy neighbours” as a matter of routine. At Old Trafford they like to point out how City are still learning about what it takes to be a big club and, to a degree, they have a point. Little things like Mancini’s players icing “6-1” into their Christmas cake. Or City printing a commemorative-edition programme when the teams met in the 2010 League Cup semi-final.
But the dynamics have changed. Mancini, empowered by a series of supportive phone calls from Sheikh Mansour, talked at the weekend of wanting to create a dynasty. For Abu Dhabi it is not about a single league title; this is a full-scale operation to shift the balance of power. “We don’t just want one championship,” Mancini said. “I want to leave a legacy. That’s how I want all the City supporters to remember me. I could be wrong but I think Manchester City are set up now to win many trophies in the future. That has to be the target.”
Ferguson, in turn, has had to start taking City seriously. The people who know Ferguson best say he was far more shaken by October’s 6-1 thrashing than he will ever probably admit. Mancini did not notice it as they clinked glasses an hour after the final whistle – “We talked about red wine,” he recalls. “I have big respect for him but I wasn’t embarrassed” – but Ferguson’s guests at his 25th anniversary dinner 12 days later could see he was still struggling to get it out of his system.
For years Ferguson had always left off City when going through the list of United’s rivals. It was always, in order, Liverpool, Arsenal and Leeds. Now he admits they have overtaken Liverpool as “our direct opponents”. Which might constitute only one small line but it is one he has never said before. That alone makes it significant.
In his defence Ferguson will say he has never had to. This is the strange thing about Manchester’s sporting enmity. Look through the history of these two clubs and there are actually very few occasions when they have been competing for trophies at the same time. For long spells United and City have simply had other priorities.
“If you look at the successful United team in the 1950s, their great rivals at the time were actually Wolves,” Gary James, the author of Manchester – A Football History, says. “Then you go back to City’s success in the 1930s and their biggest games were against Arsenal. In fact, City-Arsenal would get bigger crowds than City-United games.”
This is not to ignore the finale to the 1967-68 season, the only other time the Manchester clubs have gone head-to-head for domestic supremacy, when City won 3-1 and pipped United to the title by two points. That, however, took place on March 27th, with nine games to follow. Ferguson, in other words, was right when he suggested the 163rd Manchester derby would be the biggest ever staged.
The truth is there is not really any great competition. Which is why United’s rivalry with Liverpool qualifies for Mad For It, Andy Mitten’s 2008 analysis of the world’s biggest derby matches, but there is so little history connected to the all-Manchester encounters the author chooses to leave them out. “For much of the time,” Mitten, a United supporter, explains, “the Manchester derby has been parochial, a one-sided anti-climax not fit to be compared with the great derbies.”
Mitten’s book was published a few months before the Abu Dhabi United Group entered the equation. “It has changed now,” he concedes. “Monday will be the planet’s biggest game in club football so far this season.”
Gary Neville had it spot on: “Imagine what it would mean to Manchester City if they could win and go on to win the league? It would give the club and their players the sense of entitlement, confidence and belief that only comes with winning a title. But imagine if they lost. Imagine if, having got back into the title race, they see United win the title at their own ground. That would only reinforce United’s sense of superiority and City’s feeling that they might never get one over their old rivals. I was a United player for 18 years but I never took part in a domestic game of this magnitude.”
Neville has previously told a story in his autobiography, relating to a calamitous 3-1 derby defeat for United in 2002, that makes it seem as if Ferguson might care more about City than he used to let on. That day the beaten players walked into the dressing room with City shirts slung over their shoulders and Ferguson erupted.
“You don’t give those shirts away. Ever! They’re Manchester United’s shirts, not yours. You treasure those shirts. If I see anyone giving a shirt away, they won’t be playing for me again.”
There was another meltdown, this time in victory, after Michael Owen’s stoppage-time winner at Old Trafford in 2009. A City employee in a club blazer was stood in the tunnel area and Ferguson launched into a tirade about the Carlos Tevez ‘Welcome to Manchester’ poster.
After the last game, January’s FA Cup tie, City had to remove the behind-the-scenes footage they had put on their website showing the players lining up in the tunnel before kick-off. The reason was simple: at the front of the queue, one of the mascots could be overheard asking Aleksandar Kolarov: “Will you break Wayne Rooney’s legs for me?” Twice, in fact. His father, it transpired, had also passed on instructions to “kick Fergie in the bollocks”.
Generally speaking, though, City are no longer so uptight and embittered about what is happening on the other side of town. In the hospitality suites it is red tomato ketchup on the chips rather than the blue stuff that was served in those days when any victory, no matter how petty, would do. There is no longer a ban on staff having red company cars, just a choice of whether they want a BMW or Jaguar.
Mancini made the point that 80 points, with three games to spare, would ordinarily have been enough to guarantee the league. This summer they want to sign Robin van Persie and Eden Hazard, and those are just the ones we know about. One day, they still like to believe, Wayne Rooney might be tempted across Manchester. To this day City are convinced that Rooney wanted to join when he submitted his transfer request in 2010.
Whatever happens, Manchester’s football clubs are entering a new phase of rivalry, bigger and better than ever before.
