‘Your father’s got a 20-year start, but I’ll pass him in three’
– Malcolm Allison speaking to the son
of Manchester United manager Matt Busby
By the spring of 1965, Manchester City, relegated from the First Division two years earlier, had apparently decided there was no tearing hurry for them to force their way back. Their fans, however, felt compelled by a greater sense of urgency, to the point where some were prepared to throw house bricks through windows. Others had simply accepted the situation and turned their backs on the club. Three days after a third-round FA Cup defeat at Division Three Shrewsbury, City’s lowest-ever crowd for a home League match had been recorded when 8,015 rattled around Maine Road for the visit of Swindon.
Mike Summerbee, a man who would become accustomed to hearing 40,000 voices bouncing his name around the same ground, ran out on that occasion in the visitors’ colours. ‘I could not believe it when I gazed around at those empty terraces,’ he recalled. ‘The entire scoreboard end of the ground was deserted.’
The game, in which Summerbee contributed a goal towards Swindon’s 2–1 victory, prompted demonstrations among those who had bothered to drag themselves along. Nine years earlier, City fans had been celebrating FA Cup victory; now they were hurling missiles at the windows of the club offices. The fact that Manchester neighbours United, with a boy wonder called George Best, were on their way to winning the League title while City were stumbling towards an 11th-place finish in the Second Division only made things more unbearable.
Why was it, City fans pondered gloomily, that they were condemned to live in the shadow cast by Old Trafford? Even when they enjoyed that Wembley victory in 1956, United had gone one better by winning the League. Far from turning the tables when United won the FA Cup in 1963, City’s response had been to get themselves relegated. Now, while United were dreaming of Madrid and Milan in the European Cup, City couldn’t even look forward to being beaten again at Northampton Town. The Cobblers had passed them on their way up to the First Division.
Into such an environment stepped a new manager, Joe Mercer – a man who only a year earlier had been forced to quit football after becoming ill under the strain of trying to turn around another sleeping giant, Aston Villa. The City job, which became vacant when George Poyser was sacked at the end of the season, was hardly what the doctor ordered. It was certainly against the wishes of Mercer’s wife, Norah.
Mercer’s playing career had straddled the war, bringing him five England caps at wing-half. After playing in the powerful Everton team of the 1930s, a knee injury threatened to force him out of the game. But Arsenal gambled £7,000 that there were still a few miles left in his famously crooked 31-year-old legs and were rewarded by seeing him lead them to a pair of League Championships and an FA Cup victory.
Finally forced to retire in 1954 after suffering a broken leg, Mercer attended coaching courses at Lilleshall. In August 1955 he accepted his first managerial position, taking over at Sheffield United following the death of incumbent Reg Freeman. An unhappy first season, during which he suffered interference from the club’s 15-man board, saw the team finish bottom of the First Division. In a statement that would have significance later in his career and with which Malcolm Allison would heartily agree, he said, ‘Divided boards are no good to any club. It spells ruin in the long run.’
Linked to Arsenal’s vacant managerial position in the summer of 1958, Mercer stayed at Bramall Lane – only to move months later to Aston Villa when they sacked manager Eric Houghton after a poor start to the season. Although Mercer led Villa to the semi-finals of the FA Cup, they were condemned to relegation on the final day of the season.
Mercer guided Villa back into the First Division at the first attempt, reaching another semi-final along the way. His young team, tagged ‘Mercer’s Minors’ by the media, finished ninth in their first season back in Division One and lifted the inaugural League Cup, beating Rotherham over two legs in the final. Progress halted, however, and in 1962–63 it needed a late rally to avoid another relegation. It was Villa’s victory over Manchester City that sent down the Maine Road team.
The struggles at Villa Park had started affecting Mercer’s health. In December 1963, with the club in the midst of another disappointing season, his five-year contract expired and, Villa having won only eight of 25 League games, there was speculation that Mercer would not be offered a new deal. Almost immediately, Villa were knocked out of the FA Cup by Fourth Division Aldershot. Abuse from fans grew to the point where he had rubbish thrown at him during games.
In May 1964, Mercer, whose workload had increased when he agreed to help with the England Under-23s, suffered pins and needles in his legs while draining water from his car radiator. The symptoms were diagnosed as a minor stroke: a result of stress and exhaustion. Doctors told his wife not to let him come downstairs, as the mere effort of it could kill him. But after a few weeks away from work he returned to the club, still a long way from full health. His welcome-back present from the board was the sack, the directors having decided during his illness that he was not the man they wanted in charge. He said later, ‘I felt like a farmer who has ploughed his field, sown his crop, kept it free from weeds, watched it develop and then, when just about to harvest, is evicted to find another farm.’
Mercer’s achievements with Villa were remembered, however, when Manchester City chairman Albert Alexander and his board went looking for a new manager a year later. Having thought that the game had written him off because of his illness, Mercer found the offer irresistible, saying, ‘Life was a void without the company of players.’ Yet the memory of being struck down was still vivid enough for him to approach his interview with an air of realism. ‘I could no longer afford to be a loner,’ he said. ‘I needed to be fit and I wanted a lieutenant.’
Meanwhile, Malcolm Allison had been ‘less than shattered’ by his sacking from Plymouth. He was confident that his achievements were being noticed and his methods proving effective. Shortly after his departure from Home Park, Amsterdam club Blauw Wit made ‘a generous offer’ for him to take charge of their team, while Raich Carter, manager of Middlesbrough, enquired about Allison becoming his coach at Ayresome Park.
Allison, who had impressed Carter during coaching courses at Lilleshall, recalled having made the arrangements to travel to Middlesbrough when he phoned Mercer to congratulate him on his appointment at Manchester City – at which point Mercer suggested that Malcolm stop in on his way to Teesside. Mercer remembered it slightly differently, saying that it took him two days to track down the man he had earmarked as his number two. Either way, Allison admitted, ‘I sensed I would never complete my journey to Middlesbrough.’
Mercer and Allison had also first met at Lilleshall, more than a decade earlier. Finding Allison attempting to learn to curve the ball, Mercer told him, ‘You want to try kicking it straight first!’ At their latest meeting, Allison told Mercer that he would happily accompany him to Maine Road. Not only was he keen to work with the cheerful character the football world would come to know as ‘Uncle Joe’, but he was excited about joining a club with which he had felt empathy since an early age. Mercer, for his part, knew that Allison was an ‘extrovert, ebullient character’, but was happy to live with the moods and outbursts of the younger man as his own form of health insurance.
There remained the formality of an interview with the club directors, at which Allison was struck by the advanced age of most of the board members. When it came to discussing a contract, Allison cut through the negotiating and posturing by announcing, ‘Look, gentlemen, you don’t know me and I don’t know you. I’ll work for you until Christmas for £30 a week, then we will have another talk,’ – a discussion that subsequently earned him an extra £10. The pieces for a remarkable period of football history were in place and seven days after the appointment of their new manager, City introduced Allison as first-team coach.
As much as he’d had fun out in the sticks of Bath and Plymouth, Allison was made for big city life. If he couldn’t be indulging in the excesses of the ’60s in his favourite West End nightclubs, then Manchester was a good place to be. London, with its beautiful people posing for the tourists in Carnaby Street, might have provided the heartbeat of England’s swinging decade, but the north-west cities of Liverpool and Manchester were the lungs of the nation. While the Beatles presented Liverpool to the world and a whole musical movement followed in their wake, Granada Television offered a slice of Manchester verité to the rest of the country with the birth of Coronation Street. As a counterpoint to the gritty reality of Len Fairclough and Elsie Tanner there was the glamour of George Best, while a thriving theatre and arts scene established the cultural credentials of the city. And as Mal was quick to discover, the nightlife wasn’t bad either.
At Maine Road, City’s historic home in the densely populated Moss Side district in south Manchester, Mercer and Allison inherited a first-team squad of 21 players, many of them young and untried. In the subsequent first edition of the Manchester City Football Book, Allison recorded the steps he took to impress himself upon his new charges.
There were players on the staff who possessed lots of qualities and skills that had not been brought out; there were others, just one or two, who were well past their best. I was a new face to them. A complete stranger with a bit of a reputation. So naturally some of them were slightly suspicious of the newcomer. But I pulled the first trick. Before my first day’s training, I obtained pictures of all the players and memorised them so that the following day I would know each one individually.
It was a bit of a shock to some who were trying to hide away when I called them out by name and they were all soon made to toe the line. They thought it ridiculous I should know them so personally at such an early stage, but previously they had had no one who had been so direct with them.
Given the lack of experience in the squad, it was to the accompaniment of raised eyebrows that former England centre-forward Derek Kevan, the previous season’s top scorer but now recovering from a knee injury, was shipped off to Crystal Palace. Allison, however, had devised training routines specifically designed to probe Kevan’s willingness to make testing runs and pointed out to Mercer his apparent unwillingness to do so. It was an early sign of the influence that Allison would wield within the partnership when it came to personnel and tactics. Mercer was clearly happy to let such responsibility rest with his assistant, viewing his own priority as the creation of an environment in which the talents of those around him had the best opportunity to blend and flourish.
He freely admitted that ‘Malcolm is in touch with the players and is closer to them than I am’, adding, ‘It’s not that the game passes you by as much as it becomes more of an effort to keep in touch with it.’ He would explain, ‘I saw my role of manager as making things easy for Malcolm, smoothing the way for him and helping him along.’ Whenever Allison went to his boss with a new idea for the training ground, Mercer would smile like an indulgent parent and say, ‘Yeah, OK, Malcolm. You do it.’
Sometimes Allison’s theories and ideas – formations, training exercises and personnel moves – would come to him as thick and fast as flies buzzing in front of his face. He’d briefly swat at one and then move on to the next, while many were simply forgotten or ignored completely. One of his more bizarre notions crops up several times during players’ recollections of his tactical experimentations over the years: the wheel. That revolved, literally, around the notion of keeping possession of the ball within a ten-man circle of players that gradually rotated its way towards goal before the circle broke and someone took a shot. Allison appears to have toyed with that one for several years without ever working out a way of converting theory into practice.
Journalist Jeff Powell even remembers it being the topic of conversation during a night out at Tramps nightclub with Bobby Moore and George Best, by which time Malcolm was calling it the ‘O system’. ‘He had this system where all the midfield players, and even the guys from the front, would join in and would circulate and leave this hole in the middle of midfield. Bobby said, “Yes, but if the opposition puts a guy in the middle of that hole then he can run the game.” Malcolm tried it in a game a few weeks later and got slaughtered so when Bobby saw him again he couldn’t resist asking, “Are we going to see it again?”’
City’s squad members had never experienced a coach with such direction and drive, but Allison’s early impression was that their confidence had been completely eroded. Wing-half Alan Oakes, for example, was one of the best of a group of players developed at the club, but would break into a nervous sweat before games. It meant that some bullying and pushing was required. For the quieter players – men like Glyn Pardoe – it took some time to get used to a physically imposing coach, dressed to impress in a bright red tracksuit, bellowing and barking at them. Allison’s strength, though, was his ability to persuade them that, however flash and fancy they might think him, he had a genuine interest in them as individuals. He sensed the growth of their belief in him and themselves.
As a player whose career had been snatched away from him, he was able to transmit his passion to his players, as Summerbee testifies. ‘In a sense, his life had been cut short and his ambition to be the best was channelled through us. His enthusiasm spread throughout the team and we loved him. He had a belief in himself, in what he was doing, and he got the response he wanted. The only people who didn’t like him were the players’ wives. They felt like we were having an affair with him, we thought so much of him.’
Midfield player Mike Doyle, another player who had grown up at Maine Road, immediately sensed a new purpose about the place, a belief that the club was about to take off. In his book, Manchester City: My Team, he explained:
Malcolm was the man who did most to create this impression, for he worked and almost lived with the players and he introduced new ideas into our training sessions – in fact, for the first time in my experience, I really began to know what good coaching was all about, and what a difference it could make to a team and their game. From the moment we walked through the doors on the Monday morning we were planning how to beat the opposition the following Saturday. Big Mal had ideas which revitalised our training routines and he was very definitely the man in charge of things out on the park. The only time we saw Joe, basically, was when he came in to give us our team talk before a game.
Protective of Mercer’s memory, Colin Bell, a first-season signing by Mercer and Allison, recalls the manager’s contribution a little differently. ‘We would see Joe at the start of every day and if there was one person Malcolm would listen to it was Joe. He let him do his own thing most of the time but if Malcolm went off the straight and narrow, Joe was there. It was a father–son combination. Joe would get up and say a few words before matches then Malcolm would take over on the tactics and formation.’
On occasions, though, those talks from Mercer could be a source of some amusement. Typically, his pre-season introduction would be little more than a wistful look at the lush grass and a reminder to the players what a ‘lucky load of bastards’ they were. Before games, his notes would often be scribbled on a newspaper and there was one occasion when he spent Friday lunchtime warning of the dangers of Leicester’s forwards, forgetting that the next day’s opponents were Wolves. But Summerbee points out, ‘The boss was always there and he was the figurehead. He was one of the icons of the game at that time, like Matt Busby and Bill Nicholson, and when we got off the team bus at away games it was always Joe that fans wanted to see first.’
Allison recalled Mercer coming to the ground ‘after playing golf’ and running through a check-list of things that he felt Allison should have done. The answer to virtually every question was positive. ‘But then he would come up with a little thing and I’d say, “No, I haven’t done that.” Those tiny things make a good team.’
The first new face added to the City squad by the managerial team was Rangers forward Ralph Brand, signed for £25,000. Those fans who had been suspicious of Kevan’s departure, gained little reassurance from Brand, who would score only two goals in two years and who Allison felt gave the ball away too much. The second player brought in by the new management team, however, proved far more influential. Mike Summerbee had first attracted Mercer’s attention at Villa and with his Swindon team having been relegated to Division Three, he called the new City manager to express his interest in joining him. Packing in his summer job as a deckchair attendant, he signed in time for the season kick-off for a £35,000 fee – an acquisition Allison later called ‘a master stroke’.
Summerbee explains, ‘I had a bit of a rude awakening. I signed on the Thursday before the season and thought I was very fit. I was slim and I had done a full pre-season at Swindon. Malcolm took me out to the pitch and had me working for 45 minutes. It was an eye-opener compared to what I was used to doing at Swindon, where we did old-fashioned laps. I realised I wasn’t as fit as I thought, but it was great fun working with Malcolm.’
As well as preparing City for the Second Division campaign, Allison had been quickly developing a chip on his shoulder about the status enjoyed by their neighbours at Old Trafford. ‘One of the biggest fallacies in football suggests that Manchester United are an attacking team,’ he argued. ‘They never have been, or at least not for the last ten years. United rarely have more than two or three forwards up.’
Proving that strong anti-United resentment is not just a product of the Premier League age, he admitted that he ‘loathed the bumptious, patronising tones of some of their players, their hangers-on and many of their supporters’. Allison saw United as a self-satisfied club with an over-inflated sense of importance, and hated seeing more boys in red shirts than blue kicking balls around in the local parks and streets.
Ian Niven, a lifelong City fan who, in the early 1970s, would begin a 30-year stint on the board of his beloved club, recalls, ‘Out of 200 people in the office where I worked, I could only find half a dozen City supporters. It shows how we had lost out to the club across the road.’
Allison remarked years later, ‘One problem [in Manchester] was David and my other kids. They would say that if we didn’t beat United in the derby matches they wouldn’t go to school. Their education was in good hands – in seven years we only lost twice to them!’
Only a few days after arriving in town, Allison was invited to United’s League Championship celebration dinner, where playing the gracious guest proved beyond him. Matt Busby recognised him during his speech, saying, ‘We welcome an outstanding young coach to town because we think he will give us some strong competition.’ Instead of smiling politely, Allison responded, ‘You can bet on that, Matt baby,’ and then told anyone who would listen, including Busby’s son Sandy, that their club’s days of dominance were numbered. In later years he would endear himself to Old Trafford fans by strolling in front of the Stretford End fans before the game, holding up five fingers to indicate his predicted scoreline and making gestures as if brushing United aside like pieces of dirt.
It had not taken Allison long to demonstrate that he was going to be ‘good copy’ for the city’s journalists, although James Lawton, then a young reporter on the Manchester edition of the Daily Express, remembers that Malcolm’s trust had to be earned. ‘He was pretty user friendly and he liked the publicity, but he had his favourites. He had a particular respect for Ron Crowther of the Daily Mail. I always used to get a bit restive if Ron was at a press conference because he was a good old-style reporter who would ask pretty good questions and Malcolm respected him. It stuck in my mind that Malcolm was not just there to cultivate anybody who would write any crap.’
Allison was also very clearly of the old school of football personality who, in the days before tabloid muck-raking became more prevalent, would socialise comfortably alongside members of the media. Lawton continues, ‘It was obvious that Malcolm had a very sharp intelligence and was lively company. Stockport County used to be run by a guy called Victor Bernard and their Friday night games were a bit of a social occasion. People such as Pat Phoenix of Coronation Street used to go there and it was a bit of an institution in football terms in Manchester. Paul Doherty of Granada TV was there with Malcolm one night and they were obviously going out on the town, but Bernard was telling them how Stockport were going to get promoted, how they would get into the Second Division, then the First, and do it in a certain way. He was going on a bit and Malcolm turned to Paul and said, “I think we’d better fuck off before he wins the European Cup.”’
City’s first League game of the new season was at Middlesbrough and it was on the way to Ayresome Park that Mercer made a comment that would later be the cause of great friction between the two men. As they sat side by side on the team coach, Mercer said to Allison, ‘Son, if you do well with City there will be great rewards. Two years will do me.’
It was with those words ringing in his ears and the promise they held pulsing through his veins that Allison delivered his final pre-game reminders. While City would become known as a swaggering, swashbuckling team under his guidance, the romantic was still at this stage balanced by the pragmatist. Allison knew he had to produce a team that was tough to beat and he handed a man-marking role to midfielder David Connor, whose toughness and stamina had impressed him in training. His effectiveness in shutting down Ian Gibson, Middlesbrough’s primary source of creation, played a large part in City forcing a 1–1 draw.
The game, and its aftermath, offered Summerbee a clear view of the excitement that could lie ahead under Allison. ‘Although I was outside-right at Swindon, I almost played like a wing-back. I played deep because we were struggling. That first game at Middlesbrough was nerve-racking because City was a massive club even though they were in the Second Division. I played in my normal position, very deep, and I didn’t do badly. I went down the line and crossed in for us to score and Malcolm said, “Well done,” as I came off. I felt pleased, but on the bus to go home he came and sat next to me. He said, “Listen. If I had wanted a full-back I would have signed one. You attack people all the time. Don’t come back and defend.”’
Allison urged Summerbee, as he did all his wingers, to push the ball a good ten yards past the full-back, giving himself the opportunity to reach top speed before having to check to play the ball again. ‘In our first home game against Portsmouth I was up against Ron Tindall, who was an ex-centre-forward but was playing left-back and had good positional sense. At half-time Malcolm said, “All I want you to do is push the ball past him and run.” I kept doing that. Sometimes he’d take the ball off me, sometimes I would win a corner. With five minutes left I went straight past him, crossed and we scored. Malcolm said, “That is the best game of football you’ll play. That’s all I need you to do.”’
City proceeded to remain unbeaten in eight games, a significant step in ridding the club of the stench of failure that made Allison recoil upon his arrival. He had described Maine Road – built in the 1920s as the second-largest stadium in the country – as a ‘mausoleum’. Such had been the depression around the place that, before their first few home games, either Allison or Mercer would walk down the tunnel prior to kick-off to check how many had bothered to take their place in the stands. Yet it took only until the sixth home game, against Norwich, for the attendance to reach 34,000, allowing Allison to collect on a £10 bet he’d made with United player Pat Crerand, who had claimed that City would never attract 30,000. What made it even more meaningful was that it was a bigger crowd than at United’s most recent home game against Fulham. The jokes that had been circulating about Stockport County being Manchester’s second team were being laid to rest.
Such achievements were quickly winning over those who had been somewhat sceptical upon initial sightings of Allison prowling the Maine Road touchline. Ian Niven says, ‘I remember the first time I saw Malcolm. I was in the stand and there was this tall fellow on the touchline in a Cossack hat. He always had to have something a little bit different – either a hat or a long scarf twice the length of what it should have been. I thought, “Christ, we have got another maniac here. Who is this fellow?” In those days coaches and trainers sat in the dugout and rarely ventured out.’
In the dressing-room, Allison had found the ideal conduit for his enthusiasm and passion in the Northern Ireland inside-forward Johnny Crossan, bought the previous season from Sunderland and now appointed captain. The line-up was further bolstered by the signing of George Heslop from Everton, a £25,000 solution to the long-standing problem at centre-half, and midfielder Stan Horne, who had played under Mercer at Villa.
Meanwhile, Pardoe, a former youth-teamer, was defying Allison’s first thought of him as ‘a bit of a dumpling’ and Neil Young was getting over a ‘timid approach’ to emerge as a skilful striker. Allison himself was instigating some thoughtful changes to the team’s shape, moving Young inside from his position on the wing and recognising that Doyle’s ability in the air and Pardoe’s versatility made them ideal candidates to interchange their respective positions of right-half and centre-forward. By the end of October, City were leading the Second Division and on the first day of 1966 a crowd of 47,000 saw them play a top-of-the-table battle against Huddersfield. Crossan’s disputed penalty and a second-half goal by Doyle settled a bad-tempered game in which the famous snout of Summerbee was broken in two places.
Such success meant that Mercer’s role as a diplomat was regularly called upon to temper the boasting of Allison. As soon as he had arrived at City, Allison had been telling the media that City would win the Division Two title. ‘I used to say things like that off the top of my head, but I was always a confident person.’ It was hard for anyone to be unimpressed, though, when City beat Leicester – twice finalists in the four previous seasons – in the fifth round of the FA Cup. After almost 57,000 had seen City fight back from two down to draw at Maine Road, Young scored the only goal of the replay. Allison felt sure that his team would make their mark in the city’s newspapers with this result, but it was his luck that the same night would see the birth of a football phenomenon. Facing a difficult second leg in Portugal in the quarter-finals of the European Cup, United were inspired to a magnificent 5–1 victory over Benfica by the stunning individual performance of Best. ‘El Beatle’ was born and George became ‘Georgie’ – the first football star to truly cross over to everyday celebrity status. City were relegated to the inside pages. Once more, and not for the last time, fate had conspired to deny Allison and his team the full recognition of their achievement.
Eventual Cup winners Everton ended City’s run in the quarter-finals before a Maine Road crowd of more than 63,000 and Mercer and Allison were left to concentrate on getting across the line in the promotion race. In search of new players to provide some late-season impetus, they cast their eye on Wyn Davies, Bolton’s Welsh centre-forward, and Colin Bell, a strong and talented midfielder at Bury. Their different approach to such matters reflected their partnership as a whole, with Mercer looking cautiously at the quoted price and Allison urging a buy-at-any-cost strategy if it meant getting the right player.
Mercer and the City directors fretted anxiously about whether to stump up the £45,000 being asked by Bury, leaving Allison the task of making sure that First Division clubs were kept at bay. He made it his personal mission to track Bell as much as possible, sitting close to other scouts and managers in the stands and bellowing out how one-footed the youngster was and that he couldn’t head the ball. Whether or not it fooled anyone, Bell remained available until City had scraped together the necessary cash, signing him on the eve of the transfer deadline in spite of a rival bid from Blackpool.
Mercer remained unimpressed on first sight of Bell, an unimposing, nervous 20 year old. When Bell scored on his debut against Derby, a lucky deflection, Mercer was still saying out loud in the stand, ‘What have I done?’ and asking his assistant, ‘How did we pay £45,000 for that player? He’s hopeless.’ Bell, however, played a vital part in the season. According to Allison, it was his energy and drive that pushed them through the latter weeks as elevation to the top flight was clinched with victory at Rotherham and the Second Division title won with a 3–2 victory at Charlton.
Despite achieving promotion within a season of his arrival at Maine Road, it would be wrong to assume that Allison had got along famously with everyone and that the new regime was universally welcomed. For every player introduced to the team, there was, of course, one who had been cast aside. Some inevitably retain feelings of bitterness about their fate, in the same way that those who thrived have few negative memories. In his book, George Best and 21 Others, author Colin Shindler spoke to former members of the Manchester City youth team who had been deemed surplus to requirements by Allison.
Phil Burrows, a wing-half who failed to break into the City side, felt that Allison could have shown more interest in the reserves. Instead of dispatching them to play a game in the car park, he believes they should have been nurtured, given at least a small piece of the confidence-boosting attention that Allison happily lavished on his first-teamers. And centre-half Alf Wood believed he had been instantly disregarded by the new coach because he was not part of Allison’s social circle.
Meanwhile, Allison’s triumph, as so often in his career, had been tempered by disappointment – and the kind of insult he had felt when West Ham went ahead with their Division Two celebrations without granting him a medal. Chairman Albert Alexander informed him that Mercer was receiving a £600 bonus, while Allison and secretary Walter Griffith were to be awarded £400 each. ‘Yes, I thought the secretary did very well,’ Malcolm sneered. ‘He booked us into some nice hotels.’ Finding himself, as so often, in financial difficulty, he eventually convinced the directors to pay off his £600 overdraft.
The summer of 1966 belonged to Alf Ramsey’s England team. But while the nation rejoiced in victory over West Germany in the World Cup final, Malcolm Allison – who had taken the opportunity to observe the methods of the Portuguese team at their training base in Manchester – would learn to look back on the most famous day in the country’s sporting history with mixed feelings. As much as he took pride in the assured manner in which his protégé Bobby Moore led England to victory, he would come to believe that Ramsey’s unimaginative tactics became a millstone around the neck of the English game. Allison claimed disdainfully that Ramsey had ‘elevated power beyond skill’ and was to be a frequent critic of his methods and teams in the later years of his reign as national team manager.
For now, with City preparing for life in the First Division, Allison’s concerns were more parochial. He saw the coming season as one of consolidation and his first priority, as 12 months earlier, was to ensure that his team was built on strong foundations. He needed someone who could support the experienced Heslop in marshalling a defence that included the promising trio of Pardoe, Oakes and Doyle.
Allison’s search had led him to an inescapable conclusion. He told Mercer, ‘I’ve been to watch four top full-backs and there is a player playing at Plymouth who is better than all of them, Tony Book.’ Mercer listened and, without responding, went off to make some calls to his contacts. The following day he pointed out to Allison that Book was 31. It was not much of an argument from a man who had been even older when he began his successful stint as Arsenal captain. Besides, Allison knew Book still had enough pace to beat men ten years his junior – a quality upon which he placed a great premium. Allison, who observed many coaches leaving defensive duties to the slowest members of the team, argued, ‘It is a mistake to put all the speed up front and the slowest at the back.’ Mercer was persuaded to give Book his chance and settled on a fee of £17,000 with Argyle.
After City drew their opening match at Southampton, First Division football returned to Maine Road with the visit of champions Liverpool, who were beaten 2–1 by goals from Jimmy Murray and Bell. Victory over Sunderland made it a highly satisfactory five points from three games, before a sequence of one point from five matches brought them back to earth. The manner of City’s 1–0 loss across town at United disturbed Allison, who sensed that his players had been in awe of their opponents, an emotion of which he had been trying to rid the club ever since his arrival in Manchester. ‘That game made me determined from then on that my team would not be afraid of anybody. The players didn’t want to go on the pitch before the game. I went mad at them afterwards, calling them “a load of fucking cowards”.’
Allison chose to combat the bad results by reprising his old Plymouth ploy of utilising Book as a sweeper. Despite victory over Blackpool, it wasn’t quite an overnight success and City’s harshest lesson in the realities of Division One was delivered by Tommy Docherty’s Chelsea team. ‘Docherty’s Diamonds’ – as they were known according to the prevailing custom of giving any semi-successful team an alliterative nickname in honour of the manager – made light of the problem posed by an extra defender in running out 4–1 winners at Maine Road. BBC commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme struggled a little more with what he described as City’s ‘rather strange format’, continually referring to Book’s position as ‘sweeper-up’ and marvelling that the home team could have the impudence to play Pardoe at right-back when he was wearing the number 9 shirt.
A bad result such as that against Chelsea would leave Allison in a quiet, brooding mood. Despite the outburst in the Old Trafford dressing-room, Bell recalls, ‘Malcolm would never say much after a bad game. Maybe one or two things to a couple of people but basically he would leave it. He’d let the dust settle and address it on Monday. Individually, you knew if you’d had a bad game. Everyone gave 100 per cent, but in a team of 11 there could be two or three off the ball. We are individuals, not machines – and you could have flu or family problems.’
Preservation of their newly won First Division status now became City’s priority. But as much as Allison recognised the importance of not being soft touches in the First Division, he still had too much of the idealist in him to go as far down the road of physical, aggressive play as Mercer was urging. Allison sensed that Mercer was still snake-bitten by the relegations he had suffered at Sheffield United and Aston Villa and was all for playing a power-based game. He also saw him being influenced too much by the style with which Don Revie had taken Leeds from a lowly position in Division Two to the elite of the top flight, and the manner of England’s World Cup victory. Allison reminded his boss of his own instincts for ‘good, cultured football’ and once again Mercer relented, his confidence in Allison’s wisdom growing all the time.
A top-class goalkeeper was considered a priority and when Gordon Banks became available from Leicester, who were keen to push Peter Shilton as their keeper of the future, Allison was all for making a bold move. ‘They were letting him go for £50,000. Now, Joe was a bricklayer’s son and money was always an important factor to him, whereas to me it meant nothing at all.’
Allison’s typically blunt instruction to his boss was, ‘Ring up Leicester and tell them we’ll buy Gordon Banks for the £50,000.’ But when Mercer reported back, Allison was exasperated to hear Joe tell him, ‘I’ve bid £40,000.’
Allison lamented, ‘He always wanted to do a deal! He couldn’t do anything straight forward, he always wanted to haggle. In the end Banks went to Stoke for the £50,000.’
Good results began to be sprinkled among the traditional travails of a newly promoted team, although a few weeks without a win either side of New Year meant that City were still stuck in 19th position with 25 games played. The FA Cup not only proved a catalyst for an upturn in the team’s fortunes but proved Allison’s instincts correct and gave a hint of what could be achieved by this City team. Following a 2–1 third-round win against Leicester, City remained unbeaten in their next five League games and would eventually climb to the safety of fifteenth place after losing only four of the last seventeen matches. Cardiff and Ipswich were both removed from the Cup in replays, setting up a quarter-final tie at Leeds, who were involved in their annual unsuccessful quest for a League and Cup double.
Having achieved a 0–0 draw at Elland Road in the League three weeks earlier, Allison predicted that Leeds manager Don Revie would be expecting his team to stick to the methods that had served them so well – with Book at sweeper and Connor as a midfield marker. Allison knew that few managers prepared their teams as thoroughly as Revie, who would have studied that game, thought deeply about it and probably come up with a trick or two to counter City’s tactics. Allison’s thought process amounted to, ‘Bollocks. Let’s go out and attack them.’
City lined up with what Sky’s Andy Gray – even though he was still in shorts at the time – could have explained to Kenneth Wolstenholme was a flat back four. ‘Leeds were really rocked back on their heels as we hit them with everything we had,’ Book recounts. Had Bell been sharper with a couple of good chances that came his way, it could have been City who advanced to the semi-finals. Instead, Leeds scrambled through courtesy of their trademark tactic of having long-legged centre-half Jack Charlton clamber all over goalkeeper Harry Dowd to head in a second-half corner.
By common consent, this was the day that City’s golden era was born. With the team’s First Division status consolidated, Allison and Mercer had now seen what could be attained if they let the players off the leash. ‘City were brilliant that day,’ said Mercer. ‘We had found ourselves. We were on our way, we started to stretch defences. Fear was scoffed at!’
Allison stuck with the system for the rest of the season, with Book recalling, ‘The outcome was that we won many more matches than we lost and hoisted ourselves into a position of respectability. Next season we came out attacking from the start.’ The man who would soon be skipper of the team, adds, ‘We’d played the sweeper a few times, but with the players we had there I don’t think it really suited us. We were better going forward.’
Meanwhile, Allison’s reputation as a football intellectual and innovator was growing. His peers were to find out more about his philosophies and methods at Lilleshall, where Allison was regularly asked to be one of the FA’s course instructors. Soon to establish a reputation himself as one of the country’s finest coaches, former England full-back Don Howe was a regular attendee while on the staff at Arsenal. Howe comments, ‘People like Malcolm and Dave Sexton were the ones we looked at most closely on those courses. Every club sent at least one person – even Bill Shankly used to come – and Malcolm showed us what we should be working at. Malcolm loved to be inventive and be the first to try things. He had great football knowledge, could make sessions interesting and had a terrific sense of humour.’
Howe recalled one hot summer’s day when Allison suddenly left Allen Wade, the FA’s director of coaching, in charge of his group while he disappeared over a fence onto the neighbouring golf course. ‘We were working on dead ball kicks or something and wondering where he had gone when he came back – without saying anything. All of a sudden two blokes from the course came walking across our pitch with two trays holding about 20 pints of beer, one for everybody. We were all clapping and drinking our beer when Malcolm turned to Allen and said, “I’ve got no money – you’ll have to pay.”’
During one of the courses several years later, the joke would be on Malcolm when he became a victim of the ‘fake sheikh’ trick – more than three decades before Sven-Göran Eriksson. Howe explains, ‘There had been a lot of speculation about Malcolm being offered a job in the Middle East so one day one of the lads on the course dressed up in Arab gear with a big turban and another posed as his wife by completely covering his face. We all knew about it so when they came walking across the pitch and said, “I would like to speak with Mr Allison,” we were saying things like, “Malcolm, here are your people from the Middle East.” So Malcolm is strutting around looking pleased with himself, but in the end we just had to burst out laughing. Malcolm, for once, didn’t quite know what to say.’
Malcolm had plenty to say for himself, however, as he completed work with journalist Gerry Harrison on his book Soccer For Thinkers, published that year. The book, offering an intriguing insight into Allison’s tactical brain, is a textbook for coaches, instructing them how to get their best out of their players, rather than an instruction manual for the players themselves. Theories, suggested training drills and opinions abound in a publication that still retains a high place in the regard of modern coaches.
Interviewed when appointed Nottingham Forest manager in 2005, Frank Barlow cited Allison’s book when asked if any particular publication had helped him during three decades in coaching. ‘I had to get it when it was out of print,’ he said. ‘It’s not really a coaching book . . . I’m recommending it as a read. I think he was way ahead of his time.’
No one unfamiliar with English football before the early ’70s would believe that Soccer for Thinkers had been written by the man they knew as Big Mal. Serious and academic, the book offers no hint of the character they saw filling their television screens and tabloid newspapers. Obviously the two books are very different in nature and polished by different ghost writers but the contrast between 1967’s Soccer for Thinkers and Allison’s 1975 autobiography, Colours of My Life, goes beyond mere content. They are products of a different manifestation of Malcolm Allison. The latter is loaded with arrogance and swagger, the other a surprisingly tentative, at times almost apologetic, attempt to instruct and indoctrinate. For all its sound theoretical sense, Soccer for Thinkers appears to equate little to the man who would make those theories spring to life on the field, where his methods were reinforced by the power of his personality. The book lacks any real measure of the man himself. The only time you sense you actually hear Allison’s voice is when he becomes agitated at those who decry weight training.
One suspects that had he written it five years later, after success at City had transported him into the world of celebrity, even the restrictive medium of the textbook would have struggled to contain him.