24- City away & P***ing on Princess Parkway
Being young, free and single (yet again) I could spend my weekends watching Leeds United. I was still hacked-off about Dimples, she had started coming in the pub with a tall, blonde guy with a flat top haircut who looked like the rapper Vanilla Ice. The antithesis to me being a few inches under 6-foot, dark and cuddly.
But I had a visit to Maine Road, Manchester to look forward to on Sunday November 11th 1990, Armistice Day. With that in mind and not wanting to spark any debates or disrespect, there was no commemoration of this whatsoever at the grounds back then. No poppies on shirts, no pre-match regimental parades, no wreath laying, no minutes silence, no last post, nothing.
Other than wear a poppy or go to a local parade, there was nothing much more than you could do to remember the fallen. Because the game was in the north-west, the Burton contingent, myself included had to head out Cannock way to meet the coach. Barry had arranged pre-match refreshments but they were in some spit and sawdust at Walsall, old men in flat caps putting on cigarettes, some of the lads had got the dominoes out. Sod it, I thought and downed 4/5 pints of whatever the place was serving, it would have been Bank's or MB's.
I remember thinking it was getting unnervingly closer to kick-off and we'd be cutting it fine. So we piled onto the coach, I sat down and then like a fully opened tap my bladder began to fill. The 80-odd-mile trip up the M6 was agony and tantalisingly the bus pulled off at Keele services to pick some other lads up but there was no time for stopping and by now, I was in agony. My cheeks were burning bright red even though it was November. I kept crossing and uncrossing my legs, shifting position on my seat to see if somewhere inside me, the Black Country liquid could find some space. I closed my eyes and groaned, occasionally I'd peek at the road signs, "Manchester 38 miles" shut them again and after an age open them, "Manchester 36 miles". I remember the coach radio was playing a programme called "Pick of the Pops" where they played the chart of a certain year from that week, it was 1970's turn...."Voodoo Chile m" Jimi Hendrix..."Band of Gold" Freda Payne...."Stop the bus I want a wee wee"...
We eventually hit the southern side of Manchester, past the airport and onto that dinghy bit where the garage and church with the odd bell tower stands. On the left hand side there were football pitches galore, Sunday league cloggers huffing and puffing their way through ankle-deep mud on pudding pitches. Someone must have said something to the driver as he pulled into a bus stop, the door shot open and about a dozen lads legged into onto the mean streets of Manchester. I got up and followed them, trying not to piss myself literally as I followed them into the car-park of this pub which I think was called "The Princess Park Hotel". Despite its grim surroundings, it looked quite nice. Put it this way, the smartly dressed diners who were tucking into their Sunday lunches didn't seem too impressed with the sight of us lot spraying gallons of urine against the white wall of the car park!
I wasn't the only one having domestic troubles of sorts. In the run-up to the game Howard Kendall had sensationally quit City to go back to Everton, citing something about Everton being his wife and City a fling. The City fans weren't amused. Chairman Peter Swales put veteran Peter Reid in temporary charge, himself a former Evertonian but Reid told Swales he would do the caretaker player-manager role just the once and he either backed or sacked him after the final whistle. This stirred the City fans up at Maine Road, although looking at the gaps of empty blue seats many had obviously opted to watch ITV's Big Match Live, I was video-taping it.
We were given the Platt Lane Stand, which was an antiquated dump to put it politely. It was wooden, had a low sloping roof and the seats were rows of wooden benches with lines and numbers painted on them to replicate individual seats. It was chaos in there, we were sold to sit where we wanted and at the front of the stand, it looked like several thousand Leeds fans had chosen to stand in the well between the benches and the security fences. Those behind who could not see stood on the benches and so forth. City's chairman Peter Swales, pictured above, later alleged that Leeds fans had deliberately caused thousands of pounds worth of damage. "Clarkey" a writer from the Wakefield-based fanzine "Slag" couldn't resist a sly dig at the Leeds fans in a later issue, calling us "fat bastards" tongue in cheek of course for breaking the benches. However The Square Ball sinisterly claimed that City had capitalised on the demand for tickets from Leeds by selling more than the capacity. I'm not sure if this was true or not but put it this way, Swales who was all over the papers and News at Ten bemoaning Leeds hooligans and demanding compensation went very very quiet after the "over-selling" allegations were made. Personally I thought the FA should have intervened, particularity as this was just over 18 months after the Hillsborough disaster but seeing as Swales was a big noise at the FA nothing happened. Indeed at the other end, a load of Leeds fans had got into City's North Stand and simply were lead round to where we were after they'd bee rumbled.
With all the Manchester City/Everton links, it was written in the stars that it would pretty much mirror our season-opener at Goodison for entertainment and drama. Lee Chapman headed a Gary McAllister cross in to put us into an early lead. Then we conceded a penalty, Chris Whyte slightly nudged Niall Quinn and the Irish giant went down, however ex Everton right back Alan Harper blazed the penalty high into the back streets of Moss Side. On the stroke of half-time Carl Shutt doubled our lead. However City got another penalty early in the second half, Quinn this time adjudged to be felled by Mel Sterland, who clearly bellows on the footage "no fucking chance" but City's regular penalty taker Mark Ward stepped up to convert off the post. However following some beautiful one touch stuff, Gordon Strachan restored our two-goal cushion, City pulled one back through future Leeds signing David White and lay siege to Lukic's goal but we hung on and cavorted and taunted the dejected City fans who piled out of the huge Kippax terrace. We'd rehashed their "Blue Moon" anthem:
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