{"id":15813,"date":"2023-12-19T17:53:33","date_gmt":"2023-12-19T17:53:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=15813"},"modified":"2023-12-19T17:53:33","modified_gmt":"2023-12-19T17:53:33","slug":"my-team-your-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2023\/12\/19\/my-team-your-team\/","title":{"rendered":"My Team \/ Your Team"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the first part of his essay concerning his enduring lifelong fandom of Manchester City FC, and the club\u2019s current owners\u2019 wealth vis-\u00e1-vis his left-wing politics, Desmond Traynor recounts his origin story as a supporter of the club, and offers a critique of the Irish soccer commentariat\u2019s biased attitude to City\u2019s success.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

After many years in which the world has afforded me many experiences, what I know most surely in the long run about morality and obligations, I owe to football.
\n<\/em>Albert Camus<\/a><\/span>, article in Racing Universitaire Algerios club\u2019s alumni magazine (1957)<\/p>\n

Looking back, I can see that my attraction in starting to support Manchester City F.C. in 1968, at the age of seven, was perhaps the first indication of a budding contrarianism. Not that I had enough self-consciousness at the time to recognise it as such. What is interesting about certain decisions one makes as a child, adolescent, and even as a young adult, is that they are usually made prior to one having the full story, about oneself or others, or in general about this thing we call Life \u2013 if, indeed we ever get the full story. They tend to be instinctual, or even pre-cognitive, and so revealing of particular bedrock character traits in a still-forming personality. However, lest we kick off on the wrong foot, please note that I have not bestowed this questionable epithet on myself; rather, it has been attached to me by others. I do not necessarily think of myself as a contrarian, or even contrary. I just like different things than other people do, or have different reasons for liking the same things that other people also like. Which, obviously, could be said of anyone else\u2019s idiosyncratic likes and dislikes. It\u2019s called Taste, and there is no accounting for it \u2013 good or bad.<\/p>\n

The origin story runs like this: 1968 was the year Manchester United won the European Cup, and almost everyone in Ireland who was not already a fan of that club became one. They captured the floating voters. I thought to myself: \u2018Screw this for a game of soldiers, I\u2019ll be a Manchester City fan\u2019. This was not merely, or only, evidence of a latent, wilful desire to be atypical or antagonistic, or the product of a childish caprice: we had a good side then, and won the League that same year, the F.A. Cup the following season, and the European Cup Winners\u2019 Cup and the League Cup in the 1969\/70 campaign. The team was full of gifted players, heroes whose magical names rolled off the tongue, which still resonate today (among City fans, at any rate): Francis Lee, Mike Summerbee, Neil Young (no, not that one!), Tony Book, Joe Corrigan. Best of all was Colin Bell, one of the greatest midfield playmakers England has ever produced. Shrewd, languid, possessed of incredible stamina (his nickname was Nijinsky \u2013 after the racehorse, although ballet dancers require considerable stamina too), he could run box to box, but he didn\u2019t always need to, as he could pick out a defence-shredding pass from forty yards. He was the definition of \u2018silky skills\u2019. Such was my infatuation that, as a fledgling player, I modelled myself on his example. I even persuaded my mother to sew a number 8 onto the back of my boyhood City jersey, in his honour. (Speaking of jerseys, another reason for my plumping for City was that I preferred the sky blue they wore to the red sported by the Red Devils.) Bell\u2019s career was cut short in November 1975 when, at the age of 29, his right knee was severely injured in a challenge by Manchester United\u2019s captain Martin Buchan, during a League Cup derby at Maine Road.<\/p>\n

But then, apart from winning the League Cup in 1976 with a victory over Newcastle United at Wembley, we had a bad forty years or so at the office, with mid-table mediocrity gradually giving way to spells in the old Second Division (1983\u20131985, 1987\u20131989, 1996\u20131998, 1999\u20132000 and 2001\u20132002), yo-yoing between the top flight and what is now the Championship. We even endured the ignominy of being relegated to Division 3 for a year in 1998\u20131999 \u2013 as chronicled by Mark Hodkinson in a weekly column for The Times<\/em>, later collected together in his book Blue Moon: Down Among The Dead Men With Manchester City<\/em> (2011). Thus did the phrase \u2018long-suffering\u2019 come to be applied whenever City fans were spoken of by those of other allegiances. Hell, we even bestowed it on ourselves, often adding the equally derisive \u2018typical Citeh\u2019. In some unfathomably fatalistic way, it seemed I had been destined to support this club: its ethos suited the wry resignation of my \u2018What can you do about it?\u2019 temperament, with early promise curdling in to the predictable compromises of average adult living.<\/p>\n

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Colin Bell b. 1946,<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

City of Lost Souls<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

All that has changed now, of course. \u2018When City are great again\u2026\u2019 wrote Mancunian music critic and lifelong City fan Paul Morley, in a short article titled \u2018City of Lost Souls\u2019 (Arena<\/em>, November 1998), and lo it has come to pass. In August 2008, City were purchased by the Abu Dhabi United Group, and massive investment ensued \u2013 not only in transfer spend on players, but on infrastructure, the youth academy, and the regeneration of east Manchester with facilities for the local community. Gradually, results began to match the upturn in player and managerial quality. 2011 saw City secure their first trophy in thirty-five years, with a 1-0 win over Stoke City in the FA Cup final. 2012 brought our first League (by then Premiership) title in forty-four years, with the famous two goals in injury time against relegation threatened Queens Park Rangers to turn a 1-2 deficit into a 3-2 victory in the last minute, thus beating United into second place on goal difference (having already thrown down a marker by thrashing them 6-1 at Old Trafford earlier in the season). Every City fan remembers where they were at 93:20 on that sunny Sunday afternoon in May, otherwise known as the \u2018Ag\u00fceroooo!\u2019 moment. Me, I kept watching replays of Sergio\u2019s winning goal for a week afterwards, in an effort to make sure that I hadn\u2019t developed mild psychosis and entered an alternative reality. It confirmed for me that football provided the last vestiges of Greek drama in contemporary society, except that this was aleatoric theatre \u2013 a pop-up, if you will \u2013 for if you wrote it as fiction no one would suspend disbelief at this patently manufactured deus ex machina<\/em> finale. Just when we thought it was going to be another case of \u2018Typical City\u2019, we emerged into a bright new sky blue dawn. The second Golden Era, it seemed, was well underway.<\/p>\n

City won the Premiership again in 2013\u201314 under Manuel Pellegrini, who had replaced Roberto Mancini, the man who had presided over the beginnings of our historic resurgence. The arrival of tactician extraordinaire Pep Guardiola as coach in 2016 signalled the start of a period of sustained success for the club. City have won five out of a possible six Premiership titles between the 2017\u201318 and 2022\u201323 seasons, only finishing second behind Liverpool in 2019\u201320. 2018\u201319 saw City complete an unprecedented domestic treble of English men\u2019s titles \u2013 the Premiership, F.A. Cup and League Cup. Add in a rake of League Cups over the same period, and the rosy picture is almost complete. But 2022\u201323 turned out to be the greatest season in our club\u2019s history, as we not only won our third consecutive Premier League title, but also the F.A. Cup final against old foes Manchester United, and the long-awaited supposed Holy Grail, our first European Champions League Cup, in a final versus Inter Milan (incidentally, my favourite Italian team \u2013 almost a win-win situation, if there is such a thing), thereby achieving a rare feat \u2013 the continental treble.<\/p>\n

Which just goes to show: if you wait long enough, everything comes around.<\/p>\n