Tony Book holds aloft the 1976 League Cup with Mike Doyle. |
With Manchester
City’s players reassembling for the first stretches of pre-season training, the
inevitable pressure cooker of being a manager at the pointy end of the Premier
League begins its annual growth spurt.
Having Pep
Guardiola as manager means City can relax a little, as there are few better
options to have in control of your club’s immediate playing destiny.
Having
begun his tenure in Manchester with an unprecedented blank sheet, Guardiola is being
widely predicted to bring home the bacon this time round.
Despite the high
expectations, one might expect his unsullied reputation to win him more time
than most.
The Catalan’s simple target is to relaunch City as a major domestic
force after a lull in proceedings under predecessor Manuel Pellegrini and
introduce the club to the very highest echelons of European football. And try to keep
them there.
Manchester
City is a very different animal to the one that languished in the old second
division in the mid-sixties, down on its luck and without a hope in its heart.
Attendances had fallen to an all-time low (today’s
imbecilic jibes about empty stadiums would have been apt to use properly in those
threadbare times) and City’s playing staff lacked the style and grit to haul
it out of the morass.
Along came
Joe Mercer, persuaded to give management another go after spells of decidedly
average plodding at Sheffield United and Aston Villa. Suffering with ill health
and advised against the move, Mercer stubbornly took the job, famously saying
that “Football can live without me, but I cannot live without football.” The
date was 13th July 1965.
With the
help of his highly strung but technically superb assistant Malcolm Allison,
Mercer hauled City back into the top flight. By 1967-68, they were league
champions, topping off a marvellous season with a thrilling 4-3 win at
Newcastle to gain the title. It had been almost exactly three years from
beginning to glory. More was to come in City’s hitherto most prolific
trophy-winning phase, with the Mercer-Allison duo claiming the FA Cup, the
League Cup and City’s only European success to date, the Cup Winners’ Cup.
When
Allison took the reins himself after a boardroom coup had ousted Mercer, it was
thought only a matter of time before more glory came City’s way. In fact the
experiment was an abject failure, with Mercer’s old assistant presiding over
the gradual crumbling of an empire. City won nothing under Allison’s sole
charge and, within two years, he had gone to Crystal Palace.
When he
returned almost a decade later tasked with reigniting the flames of glory, he doused
them completely and was ousted after presiding over the dismantling of a
promising late seventies side built by ex-Mercer era full back and captain Tony
Book. Book had taken charge in 1974 and, within two seasons, had constructed a
side to win the League Cup in 1976. It was to be City’s last trophy until the
FA Cup win over Stoke in 2011 under Roberto Mancini’s stewardship.
Before
Mancini, the likes of Kevin Keegan, Sven Goran Erikssen and Mark Hughes had all
come up short, failing to break the 44-year trophy embargo placed on the club
by the football fates.
Mancini had
arrived to a hail of plaudits in December 2009 and proved a relatively quick
worker, immediately pitching City into the League Cup semifinals and finally
breaking the club’s trophy hoodoo at the end of his first full season in
charge. A season later, the coveted first league title since Mercer and Allison
was achieved, before Mancini’s reign ended with Cup Final defeat to Wigan in May
2013.
Patience then success for Joe Mercer |
His
successor Pellegrini was put under immediate pressure to come up with the goods
with a five-trophies-in five-years mandate from the owners. In double quick
time the Chilean delivered a second Premier League title and a League Cup win,
repeating the latter in his third season in charge.
As City’s
hunger for trophies has grown, so the need for instant results has been
magnified. For a club that infamously munched its way through a total of 15
managers during Alex Ferguson’s sole tenure across the city boundary, it could
reasonably be said that patience has long been a rare commodity in the sky blue
boardroom.
These days
the stakes are higher and the sums of money spent on each season’s assault on
trophies match them cent for cent. City’s stability (they are the most consistent top six finisher in the modern era of
2010-2017) has ushered in a new period of expectation and with it the
pressure is inflated.
If
Guardiola’s legacy is to create the grand festival of success that all yearn for,
the coming season will begin to define it. His reputation precedes him. His
supporters await the fulfilment of City’s long-hatched plan for a new Belle
Epoque. But time waits for no man.
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