Stephen Tudor (@SteTudor123) takes us on a trip down memory lane as he pens his early memories of Manchester City Football Club...
Revisiting Oliver Stone’s Eighties classic Platoon recently on some obscure, late-night channel I was jolted by its closing lines.
As Charlie Sheen departs the bloodied carnage of Vietnam on a helicopter – looking more sprightly after a psychotic tour fighting the Vietcong than he would years later fighting himself in real life – he narrates of the two sergeants who had battled for the ‘possession of my soul’.
That was me, I thought, with a heightened delusion that can only be put down to some obscure, late-night wine. Even so, I related.
I could relate because back in the late-Eighties there was a wrestling for my soul too, between two elder figures in my life, except this didn’t take place along the Ho Chi Minh Trail but at Old Trafford and Maine Road.
And it is only in hindsight that I realise the former never stood a chance.
A match-goer since the days of Georgie Best, my dad would regularly take me to see Manchester United as a kid.
Having already lost his first offspring to the ‘dark side’ - my older brother rebelling and becoming a Blue - he was determined that would not happen again.
So, we would sit in the family enclosure and I would cheer if United scored because I wanted my dad to be happy, and all told it was admittedly quite enjoyable.
Yet still, instinctively, something never felt quite right.
This was a troublesome era for the Reds, just prior to their remarkable transformation under Sir Alex Ferguson, and therefore the sense of entitlement that was palpable in the ground felt strangely at odds with the football being served up.
Worse than this, on one occasion, as I entered the enclosure, someone handed me a balloon. An actual balloon.
On alternating weekends meanwhile, my brother would take me to see City and that was a vastly different experience.
We would travel up in his souped-up Ford with his mates, listening to cassettes of indie bands that still mean the world to me, and once inside the walled confines of the distinctly down-at-heel but beautifully evocative ground I would navigate the urinals that were carpeted with festival-green sludge, then head up the steps into the throng of the Kippax.
Once in there I would be engulfed by swearing and the heady stench of stale bitter and being 12 years old and with nothing of me, I couldn’t move a muscle, nor see a thing.
City were rubbish that season in 1986/87. They got relegated and seemed to lose every time I went. As for the big, scary blokes who towered over me, their palpable pessimism seemed entirely in keeping with the football being served up.
I loved every minute of it.
Supporting Manchester City back then was infinitely and startlingly different to supporting them today, but that is true of all fan-bases, with the sport undergoing a comprehensive makeover in the interim.
Yet it could be said that the contrast is all-the-sharper as a Blue, given the metamorphic takeover of 2008, that amounted to a footballing lottery win.
These days, at the start of each season the Premier League odds price City as the firm favourites, and rightly so with their stellar cast of megastars and a coach at the helm widely deemed to be generational.
If you enjoyed a bet on football in the late-Eighties however, and if you backed the Blues to achieve anything of note, it would be a life-choice even Charlie Sheen would query.
Regardless, childhood doesn’t care about any of that, and more so, childhood can make heroes of anyone.
Up front for City in that era was a player named Imre Varadi, a forward I now know to be pretty limited but through my young eyes was considered to be amazing.
Out wide, dazzling on the wing was Paul Simpson, a maelstrom of pace and hijinks.
Best of all, there was the emergence of a rare crop of gifted kids, the cream of City’s 1986 FA Youth Cup winners, whose development came slightly too late to prevent relegation that year but who offered up such hope for the future.
Down the right, David White was direct and lightning quick. Criminally, he only ever received one England cap. At the back Stevie Redmond and Andy Hinchcliffe had game-intelligence beyond their years.
In midfield, Ian Brightwell was a burst of energy, while ahead of him and forever on the hunt for a half-chance in the penalty area, Paul Moulden was a poacher supreme.
The stand-out prospect though, and by a country mile, was Paul Lake, an elegant long-limbed artisan who made everything seem easy.
Later, aged just 21, he was made club captain and given a five-year contract to fend off interest from Liverpool and Rangers.
His destiny was to be a household name. His destiny was to be special. But just three weeks later an ACL injury saw his glittering career ruined.
You won’t find any of these players on a greatest ever list concerning City – though Lakey would surely have secured a spot had fortune not been so cruel – but to me they were everything.
I had posters of them on my wall. I cut out match reports and scrapbooked them. It was every cliché imaginable.
The following season City steadied themselves then came up twelve months later, beginning a long cycle of turbulence that saw them labelled a yo-yo club and across those two years I was smitten to the point of obsession.
Having long given up on his quest to convert me red, my dad was now gallantly part-funding my away trips, and I missed only three in 1987/88 while at Maine Road I was absent from just one.
City walloped Huddersfield 10-1 that afternoon as I listened in bed to the radio, full of flu, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.
It was a time when my eyes fully opened as I saw for the first time how fans were viewed and treated, crammed onto ‘football special’ trains and damned as hooligans merely for wearing scarves.
On the pitch meanwhile I began to notice City’s propensity to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory; to shoot themselves in the foot.
How could I not? The pain of letting a two-goal lead slip would only ease on Monday afternoon, dulled by the boredom of maths in school.
It was a time when Paul Stewart was an unstoppable one-man army in attack and Paul Lake was utterly magnificent. It was a time of ‘Madchester’ and flared jeans, and the Roses at ‘Ally Pally’. It was a time that created a thousand memories, mostly made up of ‘limbs’ in away ends and from all of these, one recollection jumps out, random but pertinent to what was to come.
In Mid-March, 1988, City lost 4-0 to Liverpool in the FA Cup with John Barnes resplendent and residing on another planet while Beardsley and Houghton were not too far behind.
On the way home, my brother claimed we would never see a football team as good as that again in our lifetime.
Only of course we did, and we do. Indeed, we are witness to an extraordinary creation on a weekly basis, marvelling at the wonders of Kevin de Bruyne and gobsmacked by the fantasia imagined by Pep Guardiola.
Yet, as privileged as we are to see such fun, it struggles to compare to way back when. To the daftness of unpredictable City. To when a lifelong love affair all began.
It was my brother’s love of Manchester City that ultimately won the possession of my soul. And I will always be thankful for that.
*Credit for all of the photos in this article belongs to AP Photo*
FIRST PUBLISHED: 15th July 2022
