Catch A Falling Star by Neil Young, Dante Friend Read Free Book Online Page B

very hard with Joe.
    Allison was ahead of his time when it came to dietary advice. Nowadays nutritionists favour chicken, pasta, fresh fruit and vegetables but back then Malcolm instinctively knew that we should be eating sensibly, sticking to routines, not going mad with the booze, staying disciplined and looking after your body. Malcolm was doing quite well at
Plymouth
. As far as I can recall he was a popular figure with a team on the up before he took the chance to join City.
    Yet us players didn’t think we would be transformed by this new partnership. No one could have predicted that we’d be Champions of England within a few years although we could see we were going places and that made us committed and drove us on even more.
    In particular, the new training regimes were beneficial not only to our physical wellbeing and ability to stay the course of a match but to the development of a tremendous team spirit. In the second division promotion season we’d all go to the cinema together and only have the one pint afterwards. After the
Southampton
game on the last day of the season we invented a new tradition –   going to the pub after every game! Malcolm wasn’t very happy about it at first but we kept on winning so what could he say? Team bonding worked for us!
    Another thing that also helped was our support. We had one of the biggest crowds in
England
and we were in the Second Division, which is really something because it has been well documented that City’s crowds were down to 8,000 for three games as the fans were staying away in protest against the club. When we were promoted with five games to go, the average attendance was right back up again. The Kippax lads were fantastic. I always felt I knew most of them because a lot of them came from the back streets of Fallowfield just like me.
    The optimism among our fans grew not least because all our local rivals – Everton,
Liverpool
, and United – had won the title while we had struggled along with an ageing squad and outdated training methods. City fans soon realised that just as our rivals had Catterick , Shankly and Busby now we had our own wizard – Joe Mercer.
    Another obvious factor was that between 1963 and 1965 we didn’t sign any really good players. Good managers attract good players so not longer after Joe’s arrival we were making progress. This optimism soon spilled over into the pubs and clubs – before Joe’s arrival our few fans would have plenty of room travelling back from away games, the coaches would be half-empty and I suppose only the masochists enjoyed watching us underperform . But within half a season fans would be struggling to secure a place on the coach, our away support grew and the encouragement obviously made away games a lot easier from the player’s point of view.
    In 1965-66 we won the second division title with 59 points. I scored a hat-trick in the 5-0 routing of Leyton Orient. The other goals were from Mike Summerbee and Johnny Crossan .
    Another memorable game came at
Notts
County
, the scene of my first ever goal in the FA Cup. It came to me on the volley and sailed straight into the back of the net and everyone clambered on top of me.
    The FA Cup gave us a chance to play first division sides at a time when we were in the lower division and it showed just how much the fans missed those big games.
    We knew we were coming back as a team and as a club when we played Everton in the quarter-final in 1966. Over 57,000 supporters packed
Maine Road
for the first game and just as many were at Goodison for the replay. We eventually lost the second replay 2-0 but they were really even-steven matches and we gave as good as we got. Defensively they were a very tough nut to crack but we gave them an awful lot of trouble. As Malcolm commented in the dressing room afterwards: “You’ve just run one of the top sides in the country really close. Look how far you’ve come!”
    Johnny Crossan was our captain in that