When Royle joined City as a player at Christmas 1974 he scored just one goal in his first 16 games. Many fans grumbled that their club had signed a centre-forward who couldn’t score. The following season he scored in every round of their League Cup run except in the final against Newcastle United. He was also an integral member of the team that finished runners-up to the league champions Liverpool in the 1976–77 season. In short, he came good, even if it took some time.
• Royle was good company, attentive and witty. Unfortunately, he has been interviewed too many times and is over-familiar with the procedure. He is articulate and does not avoid questions, but returns constantly to formula. As he spoke, it felt like I was hearing a recording of an interview he had already given to GMR (Greater Manchester Radio) or Radio Five Live. I tried to make it flow like a normal conversation, but it always felt like a facsimile of a conversation. Like many football people, he was pre-occupied with delivering the quip, and sometimes forgot to listen or cut short his own train of thought to accommodate a one-liner.
At the end of the interview, he talked of his dislike of radio phone-ins and fanzines. He saw them as mediums for a small sector of the club’s support to snipe. I argued that fanzines had been a powerful force of expression for the supporter. He was dismissive. I had the impression that he held an antipathy for the literate football fan, that they had nothing better to do than ponder the club’s well-being and were too ready to criticise. He said he was most concerned about the feelings of the ‘silent majority’ who supported the club but kept their feelings largely to themselves, eschewing the blood-letting of the more ostentatious fans.
In the midst of City’s poor run, many had begun to grow uneasy about Royle’s position. They had shown him more patience than any manager in the club’s history, yet they felt they were being mocked by the team’s erratic form. Royle had made great play of the necessity to reduce the playing squad, but the performances undermined his claim that he had retained the best players. Nick Fenton and Gary Mason, the protégés of whom he had made, for him, substantial claims (and rewarded with long contracts), faded quickly. In fact, they made just one full appearance each after the turn of the year. Michael Brown, City’s play-maker, was made to wait until half the season had elapsed before commanding a first-team place. Additionally, senior strikers Shaun Goater, Paul Dickov and Gareth Taylor had not distinguished themselves. They gave exemplary commitment, but they lacked the ability to hold the ball or turn and run for goal.
Obviously, Royle’s judgement on players was more closely examined while the team struggled. In his defence, he could point to the successful signings of Andy Morrison and Terry Cooke. And for all City’s failings, they did, at least, remain within sight of a promotion play-off place throughout the season.
Taking a broader view, Royle had proved himself as a manager of some calibre. His record at Oldham Athletic had been remarkable. He moulded a squad of ordinary players into a crafted, passing team, regularly beating sides with players of greater individual skill. His failure at Everton had significantly reduced his cache, but his time there coincided with boardroom instability.
Royle was a man able to take decisive action and possessed a charisma that imbued teams with industry and doggedness. David Bernstein said of him: ‘His qualities were just what we needed. He adds experience, calmness and humour and brings resilience and pride to the side.’ Bernstein had chosen his words carefully.
While City were in crisis – albeit a crisis under control – Royle resorted, as managers invariably did, to belligerence. Much of it, he claimed, was down to appalling luck, dreadful refereeing or their opponents playing above themselves. His prediction that City would embark upon a winning run was viewed as platitude. Eventually, he was proved right and they did hit upon this run.
Saturday, 23 January 1999
Walsall 1 Manchester City 1
A record crowd for the Bescot Stadium of 9,517 saw City extend their unbeaten run to five games. Andy Watson scored for Walsall before Jamie Pollock hit his first goal of the season. ‘It’s a disgrace that I’ve waited this long to get a goal but thank God it finally came,’ said Pollock.
It was the first occasion when Royle had named an unchanged team for two consecutive matches.
Monday, 25 January 1999
Tony Vaughan, City’s defender, postponed his wedding by a few weeks when he realised the original date in May could clash with City’s involvement in the promotion play-offs.
City supporter Brian Channon gave his new-born son an immediate affiliation with the club, naming him Jack James Kippax Channon.
Friday, 29 January 1999
Stoke City 0 Manchester City 1
Gerard Wiekens secured City’s first double of the season with a twentieth-minute goal which took them to the fringes of the play-off zone in eighth place.
Stoke’s skipper, Phil Robinson, was sent off after a two-footed lunge at Michael Brown who was fortunate to escape injury.
VETERAN STILL ENJOYS SOMETHING IN THE CITY
(The Times, Saturday, 30 January 1999)
Rain lashes down on to the roof of the Main Stand. A slow rumble develops and the empty theatre becomes a huge echo chamber. Sidney Rose takes his seat in the directors’ box. He is alone, but in the pitter-patter discord he will hear snippets of voices long gone.
Rose, aged 81, is, by Manchester City’s standards, a war veteran. Now the club’s life-president, he has survived where many others have fallen. Like a spectre in a smart club blazer, he has ghosted through the uprisings, the coups and the routine blood-letting of the club’s infamous boardroom. He has given almost 60 years service to the sky blue cause. ‘He’s a different class,’ says Chris Muir, a former City director. Muir should know, for he is one of the fallen. In fact, he once tried to oust Rose. ‘He is a charmer, a brilliant schemer. He sees where the land lies and crawls towards it.’
He is a young 81; still dapper, still playing tennis, still charming. I’m told he will flatter me within seconds of first meeting. He does not disappoint, the silken tongue remains: ‘I liked a phrase you used in an article the other week . . .’ He has wonderfully plump vowels and the gentle but authoritative tone of the patrician.
At a reunion dinner of the 1967–68 League Championship-winning team, Joe Mercer prefaced his speech with the inquiry: ‘Does Sidney Rose still pick the team around here?’ The diners guffawed and turned to Rose. Was he upset to be portrayed as meddlesome or interfering? He was smiling broadly, obviously flattered.
Chris Muir remembers an occasion when they were together in Canada and wanted to play tennis. They did not have any rackets but found themselves in a prestigious sports shop. ‘He picked out the most expensive racket in the shop and ever so cleverly convinced the assistant that we should try a couple out before buying them. We had a game and afterwards Sidney took them back, telling them they were just a little bit too heavy.’
When Rose first visited Maine Road, the streets around the ground thronged with bicycles and local residents rented out their backyards as bicycle parks. Spitting was not allowed on the pitch so players had handkerchiefs tucked in their shirt-sleeves. City won the first match he attended, a 2–1 victory against Sheffield United in 1929. ‘The City crowd always appreciated fair play. They would even clap the opposition if they had done something exciting,’ he says.
He is one of the few people able to authenticate the alleged curse that many blame for City’s ill fortune down the years. While the pitch at Maine Road was being prepared for use in the early 1920s, a horse and cart fell into a deep pit close to the centre circle. The horse broke its leg and was shot where it lay and later covered with earth. ‘Whatever way you look at it, there is a full skeleton of a horse under that pitch,’ he says.
Rose trained as a surgeon and while he worked at Manchester Royal Infirmary he became increasingly involved with the club. He installed an X-ray machine at Maine Road and operated on several players at the hospital.
His most fa
mous City patient was Bert Trautmann, the exprisoner-of-war who became their goalkeeper from 1949 to 1963. Famously, he injured his neck in the FA Cup final of 1956 when City beat Birmingham City 3–1. ‘After the match we all went on to the Cafe Royal in London and Bert was continually rubbing his neck. I asked him how it was and he said it was a bit stiff but not too bad. On the Monday morning it was still bad so we took him to the hospital to have a look at it.’
Popular legend has it that Trautmann broke his neck, but the collision with Birmingham’s Peter Murphy actually caused the bone to fall out of alignment, pinching and crushing several nerves. He was placed in traction and the bone eventually settled back into place. ‘People say he had a broken neck, but he would have been paralysed if that had happened,’ explains Rose.
He was regularly called from the stands to examine a player and in December 1970 he was given a police escort to the hospital to operate on City’s full-back, Glyn Pardoe, who had suffered a fractured ankle in the derby match against United. ‘Every time we put the fracture in place his foot went white. We scrubbed up around the fracture and saw an artery caught at the end. I held it out of the way with a little hook and we put the bone back together.’
His formal association with City began in 1964 when he joined the board. He resigned in 1983 after a disagreement with Peter Swales who, by way of compensation, invited him to become president. ‘I served on the board during the club’s most successful era,’ he says immodestly, a smile across his face. ‘Swales was a likeable man, but we didn’t really agree on football matters.’
He supported the campaign that brought Francis Lee briefly to power at Maine Road. ‘Francis is brusque and forceful and does not do anything by half. He might have made a few mistakes but he would not do any one down deliberately. He is a very kind-hearted person underneath.’ Rose, it has been said, is highly adept at seeing the good in people. ‘I’m like the manager who sees a bad foul done by one of his players. Afterwards, when he’s asked about it, he says he was unsighted or looking the other way, doesn’t he?’
City, such is its benevolence, has 10 ‘honorary presidents’, but Rose is the only ‘life-president’ which means he is the club’s most senior elder statesman. He still gives medical lectures and is a keen pianist and freemason, but his passion for City is undiminished. His charm might be old school, but he is resolutely up to date as he embarks on an informed critique of the merits or otherwise of City’s two main fanzines, King of the Kippax and Bert Trautmann’s Helmet.
After our meeting, he phones and invites me to be his guest at a forthcoming match. An act of kindness, the opening gesture of a developing friendship, or an insurance policy against a disagreeable portrayal in a national newspaper? City need more men of Sidney Rose’s foresight.
Sunday, 31 January 1999
Tabloid reports linked City with a major cash injection from foreign backers, with American and Scandinavian investors placed in the frame.
Manchester financial consultant Peter Rickitt, father of Coronation Street star Adam, was reportedly involved in negotiations, brokering a deal that would see the sale of the late Stephen Boler’s 26-per-cent share-holding.
Meanwhile, Paul McGuigan of Oasis, spoke of his love for the club in the Sunday Express. ‘I didn’t actually expect us to slip down this far. What we need is some people who know what they’re doing in charge for once,’ he said.
Seven
Far from the Madding Crowd
Wednesday, 3 February 1999
A report by leading accountants Deloitte & Touche revealed that City had the seventeenth best annual turnover of all English clubs.
Thursday, 4 February 1999
Two former City players passed away. Defender Arthur Mann, 51, who played a starring role in the 1970 League Cup-winning side, was killed in an accident involving a fork-lift truck. Joe Hayes, 63, a scorer of a first-minute goal in the 1956 FA Cup final, died after an illness.
WHERE MATCH-DAY WOES WASH AWAY
(The Times, Saturday, 6 February 1999)
Joyce and Janet know, and so does Elvis. The laundry room at Manchester City is a place where secrets must have been spilled, young souls left out to dry. So what do footballers, these men among men, confide when they walk into a warm room with warm hearts? Joyce smiles, says nothing. Janet fills the tumble dryer. Elvis keeps time and, tick tock, the secrets remain hidden among the suds.
Joyce Johnstone, a City fan, has given 25 years service to the club. In that time, the Elvis Presley clock on the wall has turned from white to ochre and a film of dust has fallen over his GI uniform. Along with general secretary, Bernard Halford, and the manager’s secretary, Julia McCrindle, Joyce is a rare constant in the shifting sand that is Manchester City. Janet Kirby, meanwhile, is a relative newcomer with six years to her name. Between them they ensure that, win or lose, City look the part.
The laundry room is beneath the Main Stand, just a few yards from the dressing-room area. It provides a telling contrast, with its blast of parched soap-scented air and sprigs of domesticity – an ironing board, kettle, sewing machine, boxes of soap powder, children’s drawings on the wall. It is also the only part of the football club that is exclusively female. There are no windows, just a small grille through which they can see strips of daylight. ‘In summer we have to put our sunglasses on,’ Janet laughs.
Joyce is a pragmatist, and Janet a trainee pragmatist. Ask her about the huge washing machines and she’ll tell you: ‘It’s a big washing machine, isn’t it?’ And the players – who have been her favourites down the years? She smiles again, looks around the room. Janet pretends to be busy. Eventually, they volunteer a name. ‘Kit Symons, he was lovely.’ Symons, City’s captain until he left for Fulham last summer, often eschewed the customary afternoon game of golf for a quiet half-hour with the ladies. ‘He used to come in here with a packet of chocolate biscuits.’ Did they learn his middle name? ‘We knew his real name was Christopher, if that’s what you mean’ says Joyce. So you don’t know that his other name is Jeremiah? ‘Oooohh, you’d keep that quiet though, wouldn’t you, love?’
Uwe Rosler, the German striker who played for City between 1993 and 1997, made the most memorable initial impact on them. He was living in a hotel and asked whether they would do his washing until he found somewhere to live. They agreed and when he called in he also asked them to clean the trousers he was wearing. His English was still poor and as he undid his belt he told them: ‘Now, ladies, I am here to do a favour for you.’
Footballers are famously self-important, but not, it seems, at Manchester City. ‘They pull your leg and give you a bit of cheek but we’ve never had a problem with any of them. I can’t remember any nastiness or any of them being disrespectful,’ says Joyce. The pair, both of them grandmothers, sometimes become surrogate mothers to young players arriving at Maine Road from across the UK. ‘The worst part is when the YTS lads are released. They are heartbroken when they are not retained. You try to cheer them up and do your best for them, but they are so sad.’
Kit for washing is delivered to the laundry by the club’s kit manager, Les Chapman, a former player who had a 20-year career with various northern clubs. It arrives in large metal skips and is separated into light and heavy items. Muddied kit is still washed by hand in a stone sink before it is put into the washing machine. ‘Whenever it rains on a Saturday, I think, “Oh blimey, we’re in for a hard day on Monday,”’ Joyce laments.
The basic playing kit is supplemented by all manner of items, from manager’s jackets to vests, and training tops to the towels from the various hospitality suites. The washing and drying machines do not stop turning from 8 a.m. on Monday morning until 4 p.m. on Friday afternoon.
After washing, the kit is ironed, folded and re-packed ready for collection. In 25 years, Joyce claims she has never burned a single item with the iron. ‘We’re good, that’s why – aren’t we, Janet?’ Janet nods: ‘Of course we are.’ They also carry out repairs on ripped kits, replacing zips or collar
s damaged in the heat of battle. Every item is accounted for and wastage is minimal. Occasionally, old shirts are autographed by the players and sold off for charity. ‘It’s funny, the fans want the rips left in them. It’s so they can say they were there when so-and-so had his shirt torn and then show everyone the rip.’
Finally, reluctantly, the pair let a secret or two slip out. Ian Brightwell (now at Coventry City) was the ‘cheekiest’ and Willie Donachie, the ‘quietest’. And who was the nastiest, most arrogant monster in shin pads ever to darken their room? Joyce purses her lips, shakes her head. The lady’s not for telling.
• I was surprised that Chris Bird attended the interview. His presence made it difficult to develop a rapport with the ladies. They continually looked to him, worried that they might have said something out of place. He joked along and remained fairly unintrusive, but it made the situation more awkward than it needed to be.
A few weeks later, while I was interviewing Marc Riley and Mark Radcliffe, Riley joked that Bird’s zealousness was justified: ‘Look, if the girls had let it slip that City used Lenor rather than Persil, God knows the consequences.’
Saturday, 6 February 1999
Manchester City 3 Millwall 0
Before the game, there were warnings of potential trouble following the stormy encounter back in September. Joe Royle’s comment that City were lucky to escape the New Den ‘alive’ had been slammed as ‘whinging’ by the Millwall chairman, Theo Paphitis.
Police helicopters shadowed the trains carrying the Millwall fans from London. They managed to out-manoeuvre the police, however, when they disembarked at Stockport instead of the anticipated Piccadilly Station in Manchester city centre. They clashed with Manchester United fans on their way to United’s game at Nottingham Forest.
Blue Moon: Down Among The Dead Men With Manchester City Page 13
