The attendance was 10 times greater than Hyde United’s average for a home match. ‘What’s going on out there?’ asked the lady in the corner shop just a few hundred yards away. ‘I’ve just sold my last cheese and tomato butty. I would have made more if I’d known.’
Amateur footballers arrived to play on a pitch adjacent to Ewen Fields. They changed in their cars and endured the jibes of passing fans. ‘You’re probably good enough to get a game for City,’ shouted someone in a blue and white scarf. Before the main event, many dallied to watch Moss Tavern defending valiantly on a field comprised of mud, water, sand and traces of grass.
Hyde United’s pitch, just a car park away, was remarkably verdant. Laid just four years ago, it is recognised as one of the best in the north-west, which is why City pay for the privilege of using it for their reserves. The press facilities are not quite as prestigious, with room for just two reporters who have to sit either side of Dave Gresty, a man of many jobs including receptionist, club historian, press assistant and match announcer. If you ask nicely, he might also order you a taxi.
‘Aren’t Hyde famous for once losing heavily in the FA Cup?’ asks the man from The Times, referring obliquely to the famous match of 1887 when Preston North End beat Hyde 26–0. Gresty sighs. He’s heard this one before. ‘Actually, that was a different Hyde. We were formed as Hyde United in 1919.’ Point taken.
The match kicks off and the phone starts to ring. ‘Hello, Hyde United,’ says Gresty. ‘Yes, tickets are still available. You’ll have to ask for them in the social club, but you’d better get a move on, they’ve just kicked off.’ He repeats the same information to several callers, but the next query is more complex. ‘So, have I got this straight?’ he asks. ‘You want me to put out an announcement to tell your grandparents that there’ll be a taxi waiting for them on the car park? Hang on, have you already rung for the taxi?’ A police officer, a City fan, barges in: ‘Any United fans in here?’ He hears a faint shout of assent from down the corridor. ‘Who said that? Right, you’re arrested.’
City are soon losing. Rain lashes down. A sycamore tree, still without leaves, shivers in the wind at the perimeter fence. Umbrellas and anoraks appear. The ground is on the flightpath of Manchester Airport. People look upwards and dream of aeroplanes and holidays, somewhere that is not wet, windy, dark and, in truth, an anti-climax. Two brothers, both aged under 10, huddle inside a union flag. This was supposed to be fun, City and United in the flesh, but it is flesh turning from white to purple, with goose-pimples thrown in.
The phone rings again. Is it always so busy? ‘We have one fan, Norman, he’s getting on a bit now and can’t make it to the games. He phones to check on the score. His record is 17 times during one match – we counted them,’ says Gresty. Our police officer hears on the radio that the first arrest of the night has been made. ‘It was one of the lads banned from all City’s matches for his previous behaviour,’ says the burly sergeant. ‘I hope you nabbed him after he’d paid to get in,’ jokes Gresty.
City fans stream out long before the end. Another defeat, another night when their optimism and loyalty is mocked. At least the first team are mounting a sustained promotion challenge. It’s Lincoln City at home next, three points for sure. Probably, hopefully, maybe. This was always a nothing match, a bit of a kick-about. No one’s bothered about a reserves game anyway. And the score-line? 5–1 to United. Irony and Manchester City remain inseparable.
Saturday, 10 April 1999
Manchester City 4 Lincoln City 0
A hat-trick from Paul Dickov, his first in senior football, brought his goal tally to eleven for the season as City stretched their unbeaten run to six games. The other goal was scored by Kevin Horlock.
Promotion rivals Walsall, Preston North End and Wigan Athletic all suffered defeats. ‘A marvellous set of results,’ said Joe Royle. ‘We’re closing up on all quarters now, points and goals.’ City remained in fourth place, eight points adrift of leaders Fulham, but just two behind second-placed Walsall.
Monday, 12 April 1999
City supporter Alison Anderson of Havant claimed the club’s future success depended on a lamp she had bought for her boyfriend’s fish tank. The lamp, called ‘Blue Moon’, had to be switched on before each City game if they were to stand a chance of winning. On the occasions they had forgotten to put it on, City lost.
Wednesday, 14 April 1999
Manchester City 2 Luton Town 0
Two goals in the first nine minutes from Paul Dickov and Tony Vaughan looked to have set City up for another comprehensive win, but they were the only goals of the game.
The win moved City above Preston North End into third place, still trailing Walsall by two points.
Thursday, 15 April 1999
Chip-shop owner Mike Turner promised to supply free fish and chips to all members of the Reddish branch of the City supporters’ club if they won promotion. The offer would stand for just one day – Monday, 31 May, the day after the promotion play-off final at Wembley.
Friday, 16 April 1999
Terry Cooke completed his move to City, signing a three-year contract after the club agreed a £1 million deal with Manchester United. The fee was an initial £600,000 with a further £400,000 payable in stages.
In an eventful 24 hours, Cooke also became a father for the first time after his fiancée Nadine gave birth to a son, Charlie.
WHEN SUPPORT BECOMES DIVORCED FROM REALITY
(The Times, Saturday, 17 April 1999)
Love Hearts are all over the house. Shame not to eat one or two. The first out of the packet reads: ‘Ever Yours’. Tom Ritchie holds it to the camera. He’s a clever man, the irony has not passed him by. It’s only a sweet, like Manchester City is only a football club. Best not to go any further, any deeper.
Unfortunately, Ritchie has been deeper, to a place where fanaticism meets obsession, frustration runs to illness, and your wife files for a divorce. He and Manchester City are joined at the hip, the blues brothers. City are on his mind constantly, on his lips, on his word processor. He’s at the meetings, the matches, and if he can wangle a day off work he’s at the perimeter fence watching them train.
There is a famous song about addiction to football, a jaunty ditty from the early 1960s called ‘Football Crazy’. It unwittingly forged the fanatic as the hare-brained fool, Norman Wisdom in a football scarf. So, your team lost and someone swiped your bobble cap. It’s all a laugh, isn’t it? Isn’t it?
Football, for many, is a solemn business, no laughing matter at all. It made Tom Ritchie ill. ‘City had taken over all my waking hours. Work suffered, my wife and three kids were all sidelined and the pleasure I obtained supporting them was rapidly replaced by mounting anger and frustration,’ he says. ‘This was not the normal emotional highs and lows routinely experienced by a football fan. This bordered on the unhealthy obsessive. I started acting like the nutter on the bus.’
At the end of last season, with City in relegation quicksand, Ritchie stopped going to matches for the sake of his own health. He was suffering from severe headaches, and had been prescribed tranquillisers for depression. ‘It was physically hurting me. It felt like they were killing me. I put all my City shirts and anything that reminded me of them in bin bags in the garage. It helped relieve the pressure for a short period of time.’
Thirteen years earlier, his first wife had cited his passion for the club in the divorce proceedings. Lynne, his second wife and with whom he has three children, is, he says, understanding. Noticeably, he does not say that she is supportive. He stands his ground, as he will many times during our meeting. ‘There’s nothing wrong with an obsession. I admire people who have interests, whether it be trainspotting, steam engines or whatever. It’s better than staying in every night watching telly isn’t it?’ he says. He is sheepish for a moment. ‘I only watch them training every few months now anyway.’
He has doleful eyes and the lugubrious demeanour of a First World War soldier, two weeks in mud, three days with
out sleep, nearly 35 years a City fan. ‘I define myself through my support of City,’ he says. ‘It’s like a badge of honour. City fans are of a similar mind. They tend to be humanitarian, left-of-centre, individualistic.’ He feels these characteristics have been formed through adversity. ‘The football is appalling. We’ve currently got the worst team I’ve ever seen up there, but we keep on going, it’s like an act-of-war effect. We are the most loyal fans bar none.’
His last claim is widely accepted within the football fraternity. City’s average home attendance this season is more than 28,000 per game. They have sold 10,000 season tickets for next season already. In contrast, when Newcastle United and Leeds United dropped into the old Second Division (and City are now a division below that) their attendances were below 17,000.
Ritchie is a principal personnel officer at Lancashire County Council. He is literate and erudite and one of many similar City supporters banished to an extraordinary kind of purgatory. This coterie of support is more intelligent than the people that have run the club, more passionate, yet they have been excluded because they speak in too many tongues and are too unwieldy to mobilise. They are left excluded, frustrated and, in some cases, ill, their only form of expression reduced to a jeer or shout when they are people of great eloquence. Their predicament is not exclusive to City, supporters of other underachieving clubs will empathise. City just happen to be the champions of under-achievement.
Ritchie has found succour in producing a fanzine, City ’til I Cry! Today, at the game against Gillingham, he will hand out Love Hearts to everyone who buys a copy. He has published a special ‘love issue’ and – as City close in on promotion – he has called a truce on cynicism and negativity He is, of course, delighted to witness City’s valiant promotion run-in, though even this is tempered with biting realism. ‘We shouldn’t even be in this division,’ he mutters. A win against the likes of Lincoln City or Luton Town provides little cheer. City fans feel their club is like a company director asked to sweep the canteen. Tell him he has done a good job, and he’ll tell you he should be doing something else, somewhere else; something that matters.
Meanwhile, Ritchie has spent a few hours pondering his life and City’s part in it. He phones me a few hours after the interview. ‘I thought you’d like to know, I took the family out for something to eat this afternoon and bought the kids some new shoes.’ Manchester City 0, Tom Ritchie 1.
• I was a little apprehensive about my portrayal of Ritchie. He had been extremely trusting with personal information. His writing in the fanzine had often been candid and confessional; in fact, the self-discussive tone gave it the intrigue of a personal diary. I gathered, then, that he would not take offence. Thankfully, he was happy with it and said afterwards that he had been approached by several supporters who said they empathised with his suffering.
Saturday, 17 April 1999
Gillingham 0 Manchester City 2
Terry Cooke’s sixth goal of the season invigorated City after Gillingham made the better start. Kevin Horlock added a second with a 64th-minute free-kick.
Nicky Weaver kept his 21st clean sheet of the season, equalling Alex Williams’s record of 21 shut-outs in 42 league games during the promotion season of 1984–85.
A correspondent of the Manchester United fanzine, United We Stand, secreted himself among the City fans and lambasted them in his article. He said some of them failed to observe the minute’s silence to mark the Hillsborough disaster and one supporter threw a coin which hit an elderly Gillingham fan, cutting his head. ‘The sight of him mopping the blood from his forehead as his grandson stood by his side crying was sickening . . . They’re nobodies, social zeros united by their loathing of Manchester United and their bitter camaraderie in the face of deserved adversity,’ he wrote.
Tuesday, 20 April 1999
Michael Lally, thought to be City’s oldest supporter at 104, died. He was a veteran of the First World War.
LOOK ON MY WORDS AND DESPAIR
(The Times, Saturday, 24 April 1999)
Gold watch, gold buttons, gold skin. The voice drips gold too, a molten flow of sing-song syntax. The R’s roll rrrrichly, the C’s are clipped curtly and we are told of rutting stags, yaks, snowflakes, slate-grey roofs and – of course – Ozymandias, king of kings. The match ended as a draw, incidentally. As if we still cared.
Stuart Hall is in town, and everyone knows it. ‘Joe, Joe Royle,’ he shouts as the City manager gets out of his car. The waiting press corps want a quote about City’s new signing, Terry Cooke. Stuart Hall wants Joe Royle. Stuart Hall gets Joe Royle. ‘You’re late,’ he admonishes, and issues the famous hee-hee, ho-ho chuckle. Royle, this large, pallid man in a washed-out tracksuit, is led to his office by the small man in a smart suit.
Hall is about to interview Royle for a radio station. ‘Right, Joe, the first thing I’m going to say will be along the lines, “City were off the pace and crap for a while, but now you’re charging towards promotion. What’s happened?” Something like that, anyway. Okay?’ ‘Fine,’ replies Royle. Hall claps his hands, then rubs them together. He is kindling an invisible flame with happiness, sheer bloody-minded happiness; has Moss Side ever seen a sunnier morning?
During the interview, Hall draws in close. His nimble fingers tug at Royle’s clothing. He wants him to get the joke, share the joy. Royle, since he is a football man, cut from granite and turf, does not reciprocate but the smile reveals everything. He is thinking, ‘This man is mad, but I like him.’ Hall will later say as much himself: ‘I live in fantasyland, I have a following of fellow nutcases.’
Manchester City is Hall’s football team. ‘It’s in my blood,’ he says. ‘I used to stand on the terraces as a boy with my father. I call Maine Road the theatre of base comedy.’ A few years ago, his tennis partner Martin Edwards, the Manchester United chairman, encouraged him to buy shares in United. ‘I said, Martin, I’m a City supporter, what are you talking about?’
After his interview with Royle, Hall wants a cup of tea. He strides into the canteen at City’s training ground. There is no one to be seen. Onwards to the kitchen. Through the swing doors. ‘Helloooo,’ he sings, ‘Helloooo.’ His father told him never to miss an opportunity, and this has become a doctrine. Television, radio, corporate parties, business schemes – he doesn’t so much run at life as knock it over, pin it to the ground and pose for the victory photograph afterwards. ‘Everything I do I am enthusiastic about. If I’m bored with something I don’t do it,’ he says.
Hall is 68-years-old and looking good, not that he would agree. The dashes of gold, the Perma-tan and the beatific smile are probably man-made diversions. He has said before that he is not happy in his skin. ‘I hate my body. I am runty, ill-formed, 5ft 8ins, and desperately wish I was 6ft-plus.’ Later, he will joke with our photographer and ask him to super-impose some ‘thick black hair’ onto his head. Healthwise, a recent hospital check-up revealed that he had ‘the heart of a 10-year-old and arteries like Bentley exhaust pipes’.
Every Saturday, he brings a touch of Las Vegas to wet and windy football grounds in the north of England, from where he is asked by Radio 5 Live to file a match report. The station and its listeners, know that ‘match report’ is a loose term. Extremely loose. His contemporaries tell us who passed to whom, who suffered a thigh strain, who scored the goal. Hall, in a voice as rich as crumbling fruit cake, mixes the profound with the absurd. His surreal monologues have become part of the nation’s sporting fabric. The sentences are short and resonant, the pitch dramatic and tense. ‘Snowflakes. Floated like a gauze. Through the floodlights. Ice, cold, vinegar. Hitting red hot steak and kidney pies. And fresh chips . . . I just self-indulge. I make noises in my head. I like to entertain myself.’
His father was a self-made millionaire in baking and confectionery. His Irish-born mother cluttered the home with books. He was encouraged to read the likes of George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and Brian Friel, writers of great eloquence and wit. They have remained with him, they have
become him. ‘We always bandied words around. My mother had a great gift for English,’ he says. His expressive voice, more Gielgud than Motson, was nurtured at Glossop Grammar School where he played the piano and was taught to infuse his speaking voice with the same rhythm and melody.
He joined BBC Radio in 1959 and became a television presenter six years later on the magazine programme Northwest Tonight. He wore cardigans and sat in an easy chair, ‘to reflect the lives of the people and not talk down to them’. He came to national prominence in 1966 with It’s a Knockout which ran for 16 years. His irresistible, out-to-lunch laughter was the delightful accompaniment to 15ft-high styrofoam chickens toppling from rope-bridges into oversized paddling pools. It was Stuart Hall’s inner world come to life. Millions visited this world on a weekly basis, but in a moment of unforgivable sniffiness the BBC axed the programme. Hall did not sulk. He bought the rights and £500,000 of props. It is now a successful touring event; MicroSoft has just booked it for a staff party. The chicken is still crossing the rope-bridge.
Hall’s life has not been without tragedy. His first son, Nicholas, died in his arms in a hospital waiting room when he was just three years old. He had suffered a heart seizure. ‘It was as if a black hole had opened up in my life,’ he says. In 1989 he came close to bankruptcy as a Lloyd’s ‘name’ when the financial crisis hit the insurance syndicates. ‘I was frightened every time I heard the postman walking down the path. I didn’t know what the next letter would say. I nearly lost everything.’ Two years later, he was charged with shoplifting from his local Safeway. He was acquitted of stealing a jar of coffee and a packet of sausages. There have also been several failed businesses.
Blue Moon: Down Among The Dead Men With Manchester City Page 17
