‘I’d had enough of being patted on the head. I thought that if I was not going to be given what was my due, I would attempt to take it for myself’
– Malcolm Allison
If a relationship counsellor had gone digging for the origins of the ‘irreconcilable differences’ that led to the break-up of Malcolm Allison’s footballing marriage to Joe Mercer, the obvious starting point would have been that triumphant night in Vienna. Success in the Cup-Winners’ Cup was the sixth trophy born of the partnership – if one includes Division Two and the FA Charity Shield – but the season that followed was to see them effectively sterilised by a domestic dispute. At its root was Allison’s belief that he should have inherited full control of the Manchester City team after victory in Austria.
As Allison had celebrated in the rain, he couldn’t help thinking back a few months to the moment when Mercer, following the League Cup semi-final victory, had said to him, ‘This year will do me, Mal.’ He had heard a similar comment before – Mercer’s ‘two years’ before their first game together – but ‘the times had been so good, so rich, and fulfilling, that I never pressed the point’.
Allison’s enjoyment of City’s latest achievement was all the more intense for his faith in Mercer’s intention to execute a seamless transfer of power. He later recalled:
I thought my time had come. We had towels over our heads, the rain slanted in cold on our faces, but it was a warm feeling that spread through my body. I had slogged for five years and now I was ready to receive real status. I didn’t want to clamber over Joe. I wanted recognition of my work with the team. I wanted to be the team manager. Joe could have any title he wanted.
I still valued him highly and I imagined we could work together as closely as before. Now I was to get the acceptance of a manager in my own right. It was a good feeling I took back to the old luxurious hotel near the Hapsburg’s palace.
Once he had emerged from the summer with his national profile, not to mention ego, considerably enhanced by his World Cup television appearances, Allison felt even less inclined to settle for continued status as number two. Yet it did not take long for him to experience the sinking realisation that Mercer had either forgotten, or was ignoring, what had been said. Allison was forced to accept that Mercer had simply not appreciated the extent of his ambition, while he himself had been guilty of underestimating the hold that the sequence of success exerted over his boss.
Malcolm was enough of a junkie for the glory of the game to understand Mercer’s reluctance to go cold turkey. What angered him was his belief that Mercer had twice reneged on his commitment about the future. Had Mercer never said anything to build up his hopes, Allison believed he could have continued to work together effectively with him – although it is still likely he would have possessed only a finite amount of patience in such a situation. Allison couldn’t help thinking that the original comment on the bus to Middlesbrough was Mercer’s way of taking advantage of his ambition and naivety, dangling a carrot that might never materialise.
Mercer did indicate that Allison could have the title of team manager, but made it clear that he would still make the final decisions, a superficial tinkering with job titles that Allison dismissed by saying, ‘He threw me a sprat.’ And he explained, ‘I suppose it was then that I decided to organise a takeover of Manchester City.’
So it was that the 1970–71 season was played out against the backdrop of a debilitating battle for control of the City boardroom. By the end of it, it was unclear whether Allison had advanced closer to his goal of taking complete control of the team. What was certain, though, was that he’d come perilously close to becoming a victim of the power struggle, while his relationship with Mercer had suffered irrevocable damage.
Allison’s impatience led him to conclude that a new group of directors might help to progress his ambition. He also recognised that the needs of the modern game required a more businesslike approach than that of the current board and felt that there were too few men of commercial vision supporting the chairman.
It is a view shared, then and now, by Ian Niven, whose introduction as a director was drawing near and who had got to know many of the City players after taking over the Fletcher’s Arms pub in the Manchester suburb of Denton. He offers valuable insight into the workings of the club at that time. ‘I thought the board were not adventurous or forward looking. Boards consisted of older men who I thought were fuddy-duddies and out of touch, although they were not bad people. I originally had no pretension of joining the board but I used to write to the club a lot.
‘The hierarchy of the club were very old-fashioned and Malcolm wasn’t their cup of tea. They didn’t like his attitude or his lifestyle. He was in command of himself and was so forward looking. I felt the club secretary at that time, Walter Griffiths, had been allowed to run the place. He was the kingpin and was a good administrator, but he was jealous of Malcolm. We didn’t have our own training ground and Malcolm got frustrated about things like that. When people like me heard about it we got frustrated too. We wanted the club to move on, but there were murmurs from the club that they thought they could manage without Malcolm.’
One incident sums up the stifling bureaucracy of City’s boardroom. Former club stalwart and Wrexham manager Ken Barnes had quit his job as boss of Bangor City after being invited by Mercer to join his staff, but instead ended up spending most of his days at the Fletcher’s Arms. ‘The board wouldn’t countersign the appointment, so he was unemployed,’ Niven explains. ‘I wrote to the chairman, Albert Alexander, and mentioned Ken’s situation.’
Niven warned that the outcome could be more bad publicity after a recent court case in which a director had been removed from the board. He was soon receiving a call from Alexander, who stated calmly, ‘We have a problem. The board makes the appointments, not the manager.’
Having pointed out that this was a position on the football staff, not in the offices, Niven was informed, ‘He has to write and apply.’
Niven continues, ‘Ken was his own man, not influenced by others, and he said, “I am not bloody writing a letter. I have got the job.” Eventually I wrote the letter, took Ken into my office and almost had to guide his hand to sign it. He got the job.’
In Allison’s opinion, Mercer had been too much in awe of the board to challenge their retarded outlook and officious methods. Mercer had what Malcolm felt was ‘an excessive respect for the establishment’, whereas Allison thought that the duo’s success gave them the right to be bold in their battles with the directors. He wanted to take them on over the signing of new players, improved contracts and upgraded facilities. His view was that Mercer enjoyed the power and glory, but craved an easy life to go with it.
When it became known that vice-chairman Frank Johnson was ready to sell £100,000 worth of shares, Allison saw his chance. Whoever bought those shares would be close to taking control of the club. He identified a possible buyer in Oldham-based double-glazing tycoon Joe Smith, who asked Ian Niven if he could set up a meeting with Johnson. ‘I knew Joe from my pub,’ says Niven. ‘I thought it was great that we had someone new who wanted to get on the board.’
Smith had been a City fan for as many of his 51 years as he could remember, although Niven says, ‘He had done well in life and saw it more as a business. He’d moved from selling encyclopaedias to windows, had spent time in Canada and was ahead of the game in double glazing in this country. I think he saw City as a bit of an ego thing.’
Having agreed a deal with Johnson, Smith went to see Albert Alexander to explain his plans for the club, although he was hardly welcomed with open arms. An indignant Alexander said, ‘I hadn’t had my breakfast when he called on me. I told my wife to ask him to wait while I washed and shaved.’
Smith was soon declaring that he and his partners had bought Johnson’s 521 shares, claiming that the main reason behind his involvement was to safeguard Allison’s future with the club. Saying he had no desire to remove Alexander as chairman, he added, ‘I will do my utmost, everything in my power, to cooperate in any way in any project with Mr Allison to better the club. He is the greatest man in football.’ According to Allison, Smith promised him a 20-year contract with City if he took control of the club.
Tony Book recalls becoming aware of something brewing when he arrived for a game to see a gleaming new Rolls-Royce pulling into the Maine Road car park. ‘Someone said to me, “You will have to be watching that car soon.” It turned out to be Joe Smith’s.’ The newspapers made sure that the players didn’t need to keep their eyes peeled in the parking lot to know that a major shift in the club’s balance of power was taking place. According to Book it was ‘a trying time’.
By 24 November, the day of what proved to be a stormy board meeting, the takeover group – Smith, Niven, Chris Muir and existing shareholder Simon Cussons – were reported to be ready to complete amicable negotiations. Johnson, however, said he had changed his mind about selling 510 of his 521 shares to Smith, claiming he didn’t know the consortium included Muir, the director who had been asked to resign a year earlier. Smith responded by insisting he had a signed agreement.
Meanwhile, the board had gone to Mercer after hearing of Smith’s bid and asked him bluntly, ‘Whose side are you on?’ Mercer, as Allison would have expected, was with the board. ‘How do you hijack a football club in full flight?’ he said.
Allison’s role in the plot, and his undisguised support for Smith, was by now making the directors uneasy. Alexander emerged from the boardroom with a warning. ‘We don’t go around with our eyes closed and I would like Malcolm to know that.’
Another board meeting was planned three days later, on the Friday of the same week. The rumour mill predicted the sacking of Allison, whispers that got back to Malcolm. The players, preparing for a difficult game at Leeds the next day, had, according to observers, shown signs of hostility towards their coach. Battles between directors might have been beyond their sphere of influence or interest, but it was different when the familiarity of their footballing infrastructure was threatened. Allison recalled Francis Lee, Mike Summerbee and Colin Bell approaching him to ask why he wanted to change something that had been so successful. It was not so much an ‘Allison or Mercer’ situation as it was a desire to keep together their partnership. But the two men now appeared to be on either side of an unbridgeable divide.
As training concluded, Mercer fell into step alongside Allison and said, ‘You are on your own now, Malcolm.’
Allison replied, ‘That doesn’t bother me, Joe. I have always been on my own.’
Goalkeeper Joe Corrigan says that most players had been so focused on their own jobs that they were unaware that Allison’s ambition and desire for public acknowledgement were creating a rift with Mercer until they started reading about it in the newspapers. ‘We knew there were things going on in the background and talk of a takeover, but we didn’t really know anything about Joe and Malcolm. Things like that didn’t really affect us. I was only interested in playing.’ Summerbee agrees, saying, ‘I was quite shocked when it came about. I think Malcolm listened to the wrong people at the wrong time.’
The view of many players was that Mercer made sure Allison received plenty of credit for his contribution to the club’s achievements. That partly explains the reports of their hostility towards Allison’s actions at the time – feelings that have admittedly been forgotten and forgiven. But it still does not take into account Malcolm’s burning ambition. Being a coach, no matter how much his influence was recognised, was no longer the role he wanted.
Lee points out, ‘Malcolm was probably one of the best coaches the game has ever seen and at that time he was probably the best in the world. But the moment he hit the big time and things started to go really well he wasn’t happy to be the coach, he wanted to run everything. The same thing happened years later when he went to Portugal. He won the championship, but ended up wanting to be president of the club, running everything. That was his biggest problem.’
Upon returning to his former club to join the coaching staff, Ken Barnes explained that ‘it only took five minutes to see the relationship was under strain’. He continued, ‘Anyone at the club could see what was happening. Malcolm wanted to be the manager no question about it. My first impression of him was that success had gone to his head a bit. He had a bit of a swagger, a bit of a swank about him.’
For younger players who had not been at the club in the early days of the Allison–Mercer double act, any shift in the balance of the roles and relationship appeared purely cosmetic. While the senior members of the squad recall the regular presence of Mercer at training in the early days, youngsters like Ian Mellor saw the manager purely as a figurehead. ‘All the time I was in the first team squad I never saw Joe Mercer,’ he says. ‘He came on the training pitch once in his shoes and it was embarrassing. He was a great PR man, but the modern game was changing and he was getting too old. To see him in a coaching situation seemed like being in a time warp. You thought, “This isn’t your place.” Malcolm ran the show.’
Some players had been given the opportunity to see first-hand evidence of a possible conflict between the club’s two leading men. Striker Chris Jones, for example, had – as far back as the summer of 1968 – voiced concerns to Mercer that Allison didn’t rate him and therefore he had doubts about his future at the club. Mercer’s reply was, ‘I don’t care what Malcolm thinks. I’m the boss here.’ Yet when he approached Allison, he was advised to accept a transfer to Swindon to make way for Bobby Owen, whom Malcolm planned to sign from Bury. Jones decided that Allison held sway and accepted the move.
Barnes recalls another incident when a fan asked Allison, ‘How’s Joe?’ To which Allison barked back, ‘Joe who? I run the team.’
Now, at that Friday night board meeting, Allison was asked where he stood in the takeover and how he saw his role at Maine Road. He informed the directors that he had the interests of the club at heart but that penny-pinching could stop them becoming truly great. He spoke of the ‘small-time attitude of the board’, a comment he sensed had made it easy for them to fire him. But whatever was decided after Allison left the room remained among those present as City prepared for their trip across the Pennines.
On the team bus to Leeds the next morning, Mercer once again appeared next to his lieutenant. This time he indicated to Allison a change of heart. ‘I have thought it over. It is you and me together. We are this bloody club.’ If Mercer expected Allison to fall into his arms, he was disappointed. Instead, Allison nodded and remained aloof, still stung by Mercer’s apparent abandonment of him the previous day.
The game at Elland Road mirrored the disappointment of much of City’s previous two months. Having started the season with six wins and two draws in the first eight games to top the First Division, a 1–0 defeat against new leaders Leeds meant they had won only two of the subsequent ten games. They had also gone out of the League Cup at Second Division Carlisle United.
At six o’clock, the pleasantries in the home team’s boardroom having been dispensed with, chairman Alexander approached Allison in one of the corridors under the Elland Road stand. ‘Malcolm, the board want to sack you,’ he reported.
Allison, who had great personal affection for Alexander, put his arm round him and said, ‘You do what you feel you have to do.’
The words were still hanging in the air when, like the shopkeeper appearing from nowhere in the Mr Benn cartoons, Mercer materialised to announce, ‘If he goes, I go.’ Allison, for now, had been saved.
Niven witnessed the scene, although unaware of its significance. ‘I remember seeing Malcolm coming down the stairs inside. The chairman had his arm round him. They were having very close discussions and the chairman didn’t look very happy. Later that night I got a call saying Malcolm had been sacked and I realised I had probably seen it.’
What Niven didn’t know was that the City directors had hurriedly re-grouped in the Leeds boardroom and instructed Allison to report for a meeting with four of them at the Piccadilly Hotel in Manchester. There he was reinstated and given a ‘final warning’ about taking sides in the boardroom battle – although Allison was never going to be frightened into silence by a bunch of old men.
It was made clear that Mercer’s intervention had been Allison’s salvation, but that couldn’t erase his simmering resentment at the two unfulfilled promises to hand over power. Allison no longer felt the close bond with the man for whom he had originally been so eager to work. Their relationship had even reached the point where a general conversation in a hotel bar about ‘power and men’ had turned into a stand-up row, the subject matter having been, according to Allison, ‘too close to the bone’.
The battle was far from over and for neutral observers it was painful to watch. ‘Malcolm wanted to be an institution at City and it damaged his reputation,’ says journalist James Lawton. ‘As an observer I felt very torn at that time because I identified with Malcolm as his journalistic contact but Joe was an irresistibly attractive man in his own right. I loved Joe but I do think there were some seeds of truth in Malcolm’s frustration that he didn’t step aside. Joe latched onto Malcolm as a brilliant ramrod and coach but he wasn’t ready to hand over the glory.
‘It was sad because when they were good, they were very warm together. I remember going on a scouting mission to Coimbra with Joe and Malcolm in the season they won the Cup-Winners’ Cup. After a few drinks in Lisbon, we went up country on the train and went out to dinner in a little restaurant and then to a nightclub. When we got back to the hotel Joe was pretty paralysed and when we got him into his room he said, “The fucking room is spinning, Malcolm.” Malcolm replied, “Joe, it is not a problem. Just put one foot on the floor and it will stop.” Joe put his foot on the floor, this great look of relief crossed his face and he said, “You are a brilliant man, Malcolm.”’
While Allison and Mercer continued to undermine such moments of harmony, Joe Smith completed his haggling with Johnson, agreeing a price of £110,000 for his shares. The existing board members, however, threatened legal action, claiming Johnson was obliged by covenant to have offered his shares to current members of the board before selling to an outsider. It was an argument they would subsequently lose.
In the meantime, another proposition had been placed before Allison. Rainwear manufacturer Ralph Levy approached him while the Johnson–Smith negotiations were in progress with the revelation that he had £500,000 to invest in the club if no deal was done. Having realised that his arrival on the scene was too late for City, he was intrigued when Allison told him he had heard that Bolton Wanderers could probably be bought for £50,000. Levy asked Allison if he was interested in being manager at Burnden Park and becoming a director of one of his companies. Allison was briefly tempted, but felt that Bolton was a ‘rundown club’ and he was disinclined to go through the kind of regeneration programme he had completed at Maine Road.
Allison was not prepared to compromise. He didn’t simply want to be the number-one man at any club: that club had to be Manchester City. He felt he had earned the right. Had he been willing to move elsewhere to achieve his aim of being undisputed manager, there would have been any number of opportunities. But that was not Allison’s way.
Besides, with the Smith deal having gone through, Allison appeared on the brink of achieving his ambition. As he wrote his cheque and took his seat on the board, Smith asked Allison exactly what he wanted. It was an easy question to answer: a new contract and to be the manager. Smith assured Allison that there would be no question of who was in charge. But Mercer was sticking to his guns. He would relinquish the title of team manager only as long as he retained the final say.
Allison’s wishes weren’t about to be granted. He was offered a new contract – one that his solicitor proceeded, metaphorically, to tear to pieces. Allison reported to the board that his contract was worthless. And Mercer was still in charge. ‘I felt terribly frustrated,’ said Allison, who admitted finding it difficult to focus on coaching. ‘I had lost the drive and strength which had carried me – and City – into such a position of strength.’
On the field, City’s campaign was meandering. In the middle of January, they began a run of ten League games without victory. The game that ended the sequence, a 3–0 home success against Everton, would be their only win in the final 19 matches. By the end of the season home crowds were dipping below 20,000 and it was only their fast start that enabled them to finish in the top half of the table.
The FA Cup offered City the final hope of maintaining their sequence of domestic success and they were drawn away in the fourth round to holders Chelsea. Without the injured Francis Lee and Glyn Pardoe, whose leg had been broken in a tackle with George Best during City’s derby victory in December, City were comfortable 3–0 winners, with Bell grabbing a couple of goals.
The fifth round paired them with title-chasing Arsenal, the kind of disciplined team whose organisation Allison could admire while condemning their lack of flair. The one player in the Gunners team who contradicted their workmanlike, professional personality was the young, long-haired Charlie George. By the time a waterlogged Maine Road had forced the game to be pushed back four days, Allison and George were the focus of attention in the Arsenal dressing-room. Gunners centre-forward John Radford explains, ‘Frank McLintock goaded Charlie into winning the game for us. Frank went to Charlie and told him that Malcolm had been in the papers saying that he was just an upstart, that he wasn’t as good as everyone said he was. Well that was it for Charlie; he went out and had a blinder.’
On a wet and foggy night, George scored two individual goals, a free-kick from the edge of the box and a spectacular run from the halfway line, against a solitary reply by Bell. ‘After Charlie scored he was running along the touchline signalling at Allison,’ Radford recalls.
The Football Association, meanwhile, were preparing their own retribution for the outspoken Allison. The touchline ban had done little to soften his attitude to authority and at the end of March, he was up before the FA again for ‘bringing the game into disrepute’ – something Malcolm felt the game’s bosses were themselves guilty of on an almost daily basis. The latest misdemeanour had come in December when he directed an outburst at Bolton referee Bob Matthewson, the former professional player, during half-time of a game at Burnley. Allison accused him of favouring the home team, although he later claimed that ‘the remarks were intended to be light-hearted’. This time his sentence was to be banned from active participation with the team for 12 months and fined £2,000. Ten months of the sentence was suspended until the end of 1973, which meant he had effectively been placed on probation for the best part of three years. A furious Allison argued that he had been victimised, saying, ‘Anyone else would have got away with it.’
The punishment meant that Allison was not allowed to work with his players or even watch games at Maine Road. He could go to away games if he bought a ticket. The situation with Mercer was to come to a head during Allison’s absence. As the programme of Easter games approached, City’s season now hung entirely on their defence of the European Cup-Winners’ Cup, where they had recovered from an unimpressive start to face Chelsea in the semi-finals.
Having beaten Linfield, the Northern Ireland part-timers, by only a single goal at home, they had then, embarrassingly, lost the away leg 2–1, relying on Lee’s away goal to send them through at the end of a night that saw goalkeeper Joe Corrigan pelted with bottles.
Lee was on target again in each of two wins over the Hungarian side Honved, results that meant a lot to Allison given the influence that country’s footballers had over his professional development. In the quarter-final, City found themselves two goals down after a first leg in Katowice against the Gornik team they had beaten to win the trophy. With key men missing through injury, they levelled the aggregate scores in the second leg and – these being the days before penalty shoot-outs – took the tie to a third game. The day after the FA had passed sentence on Allison, goals by Young, Booth and Lee earned a 3–1 win in Copenhagen, an admirable performance by a side missing half its regular members. Even Arthur Mann, a capable replacement defender, had been left at the airport in Manchester after tranquillisers failed to combat a pre-flight panic attack.
City now faced three First Division games in four days over Easter before playing their semi-final after a break of only two days. Allison felt it was impossible to ask the first-team players to go through such an arduous programme and still be physically ready for Chelsea. After defeats against Nottingham Forest and Huddersfield, he urged Mercer to rest key players for the Easter Monday game at Newcastle. But with Summerbee, Oakes, Pardoe and Heslop already set to miss the Chelsea game, and Derek Jeffries having suffered injury on Good Friday, Mercer stubbornly played the strongest possible team in a 0–0 draw. Allison believed that Mercer’s selection had been motivated by his fear of losing three in a row. Mercer, according to Malcolm, thought people would see another loss as proof that he could not succeed without Allison at his shoulder. Midfielders Bell and Doyle duly suffered injuries that would end their seasons, while Corrigan would be forced to face Chelsea with his left eye virtually shut after suffering a blow to the face. Allison told Mercer to his face that his ego had undermined the season.
It was this understrength City team – including 17-year-old Jeff Johnson – that took the field at Stamford Bridge: Corrigan, Book, Connor, Towers, Booth, Mann, Donachie, Johnson, Hill, Lee, Young. Chelsea had also suffered over Easter, losing centre-forward Peter Osgood, and City performed with courage and conviction – although a defensive lapse allowed makeshift striker David Webb to set up South African Derek Smethurst for the only goal.
Summerbee’s return for the second leg was countered by the absence of Corrigan and Booth and Chelsea again scored the one goal of the contest, stand-in keeper Ron Healey fumbling an indirect free-kick by Keith Weller into his goal. The somewhat farcical manner of City’s relinquishing their trophy seemed entirely in keeping with the events of the season.
The rumblings around the club continued throughout the summer. The newly constituted board now included not only Smith and Niven, but future club chairman Peter Swales, who had joined in April. Swales was supposed to be playing the role of peacemaker and many felt he quickly seized the power in the boardroom. ‘He was a very good businessman and a very hard man,’ says Niven. ‘I gathered that he and Malcolm didn’t get on. They were two very ambitious people. Peter had one ambition only, which was to be chairman.’
Existing chairman Albert Alexander wrote of the events in the boardroom in the match programme for the first game of the 1971–72 season, against Leeds. ‘All these problems of the club have now been amicably solved in what we all trust will be the best interests of Manchester City,’ he chirruped. Tellingly, he neglected to make mention any of the new board members.
Mercer remained in overall charge of the team, and his cautious attitude in the transfer market caused yet more friction between him and Allison, who was desperate to add Rodney Marsh, the flamboyant Queens Park Rangers forward, to the City line-up. The two clubs appeared to have settled on a fee of £140,000 but a disagreement over whether that included VAT or not ended with Mercer advising the board not to pay any more.
The clock was ticking on the Mercer–Allison partnership. Finally, following a 3–0 League Cup defeat at Bolton early in October, zero hour was reached. After a three-hour board meeting, club secretary Walter Griffiths declared, ‘The board is pleased to announce the appointment of Malcolm Allison to the position of team manager with full responsibilities to the board for all team management. Mr Joe Mercer will continue as manager of the club.’
While expressing his public support for Allison’s elevation, Mercer made sure to point out, ‘I still believe I have a lot to offer.’ And his lack of confidence in the practicality of the new arrangement could not have been much more obvious when he said, ‘I’m a tactician not an administrator and don’t really see myself as a general manager.’
Within the next few weeks, further changes at Maine Road would be revealed, with 38-year-old Eric Alexander succeeding his father as chairman and Smith becoming vice-chairman. Colin Bell was installed as team captain, with Tony Book taking the title of club captain.
Allison’s first game as manager was a 1–0 win against Everton. As he spoke to the press in the boardroom after the game, cigar in one hand and glass of champagne in the other, he was asked how good a manager he would become. Such a question to a publicity seeker like Allison was like offering a drug addict the keys to the pharmacy. ‘Probably the best there ever was,’ Allison replied, certain of the headlines such a comment would create. ‘And I’ll tell you something else. It will be nice to walk out at Wembley ahead of the Cup final team.’ But he was honest enough to admit, ‘Today has been so different for me. Doubts arose that had never been there before purely because of the new situation I was in. It was a strange feeling.’
Asked about his future relationship with players to whom he had been so close, he shrugged off potential problems. ‘They can call me what they like. “Sir” and “boss” are for the establishment.’
The other obvious question was whether the additional responsibility as figurehead of the club would bring a change in Allison’s confrontational manner. ‘People think that carrying the full title of team manager will help keep me out of trouble,’ he said, before lapsing into convenient memory loss. ‘That side of my football life is behind me anyway. I haven’t been involved in any real clashes with authority for three years now. There is no need these days. Before it was a lot of frustration trying to get myself and the club noticed.’
The players’ view of the new dynamic between Allison and Mercer – albeit one sanitised for public consumption – was offered by Francis Lee in his column in Manchester’s Football Pink:
It’s pointless to argue which needed the other the most. They needed each other and we all benefited. It is certainly true that while Malcolm worked brilliantly with the players, he needed Joe at times to put a restraining hand on him. Malcolm’s early years in Manchester were studded with forthright and controversial outbursts.
He doesn’t have too much regard for the establishment and not being a sufferer of fools gladly he has had his brushes with authority. I suppose he will never be a diplomat like Joe Mercer or Sir Matt Busby, but he has learned a great deal of control and I think the time is right for him to have the full responsibility of manager.
If the changes were meant to mean the end of the unrest at the club, someone miscalculated badly. No one was about to live happily ever after. As City chased another First Division title, Mercer no longer felt close enough to the team, while Allison thought Joe was too involved and would end up describing him as ‘a sort of shadowy presence’.
Niven explains, ‘We [the new board members] were big supporters of Malcolm, but we weren’t anti-Joe Mercer. Joe wasn’t happy about the new situation. He didn’t want to be director or football consultant or anything like that. The board didn’t want either of them to go, but it turned out to be a compromise that satisfied neither of them.’
By the end of the season, chairman Eric Alexander would be forced to admit, ‘Since Malcolm took over as team manager [he and Joe] have not hit it off.’ He offered the trite explanation that ‘it is probably because they come from different eras’, ignoring the reality that their differences were far more to do with a conflict of ambition than a generation gap.
As the postscripts to the 1971–72 season were being written, the City board sat down to address Mercer’s job description, one that would likely have been centred on public relations and ambassadorial duties. Before any resolution had been reached, Mercer saved them the bother by announcing that he was to take the job of general manager at Coventry City, where he would form a new partnership with the young team manager Gordon Milne. Mercer knew that Allison didn’t want him and sensed that the club directors weren’t bothered what happened to him. As well as losing his title, he claimed his parking space had been taken away and his name removed from the door of what he thought had been his office. According to Swales, ‘The board had to choose between Malcolm Allison and Joe Mercer – and we chose Malcolm Allison.’
Mercer felt he could have been accommodated on the board in the manner of Busby at United. Perhaps the sight of subsequent managers Wilf McGuinness and Frank O’Farrell being intimidated and undermined by the continuing influence of Busby at Old Trafford convinced the City board that it wasn’t such a good idea. Mercer, however, was not quite the powerful patriarch that Busby was, while Allison was much more independent and thick-skinned than McGuinness and O’Farrell.
Mercer’s parting comments left no one in any doubt about his sorrow over the situation at Maine Road. ‘The humiliating part of this sad affair is that at one time the board were saying there was a job for life. But I finished up by being offered a three-year engagement plus a thirty-three and a third per cent cut in salary. However, the thing that hurt most of all was that they just didn’t know what to call me. All my life I have been known as Joe Mercer the footballer or Joe Mercer the manager. Then suddenly they can’t find a title for me. That was when my pride was hurt most of all.
‘I always wanted [Malcolm] to have the job but at the same time I wanted to retain some control, although that can only be done on a mutual understanding. I did not want to be shorn of all authority, but unfortunately it was not to be. I am the sort of person who has got to be involved in the footballing side of football, helping to create and build teams, making and taking decisions and formulating policy.’
Alexander’s response to Mercer was, naturally, to defend the club’s actions. ‘We have been cast as villains of the piece and it is simply not true. The fact is that we have bent over backwards to create a situation in which Joe and Malcolm would not clash. It has to be admitted that the pair are not compatible.’
Contacted in South Africa, where he was involved in coaching courses, Allison didn’t do himself any favours by showing little compassion towards his former mentor. ‘Before I left Manchester to come to South Africa I told Mercer all there was to be told. He knew exactly where he stood. Why must these questions be brought up again? Mercer knows how I feel. In effect he was relegated to opening the mail.’
If Allison had been that blunt to Mercer’s face in letting him know ‘where he stood’ it was insensitive and disrespectful. Yet he had simply gone beyond the stage of being able to trust Mercer’s ambition. Malcolm now had what he wanted, but it was not in his nature to be a gracious winner. The manner of his former boss’s departure and his reaction to it undoubtedly diminished Allison in the hearts of fans who had previously worshipped both men. Sympathy for Mercer was strong and the club’s supporters’ association pointedly invited him to their annual dinner dance.
Mercer was too clever in the field of public relations to be drawn into a slanging match. Instead, he said, ‘Never let anyone forget the contribution Malcolm Allison has made to City. Never let anyone undervalue what he has done.’ But he couldn’t resist offering Allison a word of caution. ‘There are more things to managing than coaching. If I could offer him a piece of advice it would be to listen. Please yourself what you do afterwards, but do listen to others first. For when you stop listening you stop learning.’
Allison would write in 1975 that ‘I no longer care one way or another whether I ever hear from Joe Mercer again’. Looking back on their partnership he said:
I suppose the best thing is to say there is nothing owing from that relationship. We gained so much from it personally, though in the process we lost the thing which made all those successes happen, an implicit friendship and understanding. My complaint, my bitterness, flows from a feeling that the relationship was always tilted subtly in Joe’s favour.
Part of that final point was Allison’s recognition that Mercer had been careful to depart from Maine Road with his legacy untainted and his place in the affection of the supporters secure. ‘Joe had controlled his personal position with great skill. He had come out smelling of roses.’
Meanwhile, Allison would now have to prove himself to the City fans all over again. Not only was he seen by some as being responsible for Mercer’s eviction, he was being held personally accountable for having thrown away the 1971–72 League Championship after one of the most gripping title races in English football history.