Catch A Falling Star (25 page)

The main difference though is the quality of pitches. Today you have multi-million pound stadiums with their
bowling green
surfaces,
we would have loved to have played on them I can tell you. Some of the pitches we experienced were mud baths and games that went ahead then would have been postponed these days. The footballs are also much lighter than the leather
caseys
we had to head. When it rained they used to weigh twice as much. So I think when you consider the conditions we faced at times, we played some really great football at City.

Then there’s the fact that the Premiership is a much less competitive league. Four clubs at best can win the league in
England
. Two can win it in
Scotland
. Three in
Holland
and the same clubs seem to win the league in
Italy
,
Spain
, and
Germany
. It’s all about money. When I played, eight or nine different clubs won the league in a ten-year period: Arsenal, Everton, United,
Leeds
,
Liverpool
, Spurs and even
Derby
County
, all lifted the trophy either side of our triumph in ’68. In that respect it was much more interesting, the best team rather than the best bank balance won.

Money maybe flowing into the Premiership but we are still a little bit short at the top level as Euro 2004 showed. The managers’ tactics could be questioned but I think we have to go back to when it was limited to four foreign players per side. That way I think more home grown talent will emerge and it would also force more clubs to bring their youth policy up to scratch.

I wonder what’s gone wrong because in the 60s and 70s we had at least six or seven players who had emerged through the junior ranks and other clubs were the same. Last season I watched City play United on TV and there was only one player who had played for City’s junior side and that was Shaun Wright-Phillips. It’s not just City though, it is most clubs in the Premiership.

To be a coach at a top club now you have to be able to speak six languages. Some teams don’t even contain an Englishman? How can that happen in
England
?

Nowadays it’s far too easy for a club to go abroad and buy a £1m or £2m player.
Players from
Africa
,
Scandinavia
, even
China
play in
England
yet how many of our players go the opposite way to the top leagues in
Italy
,
France
,
Germany
and
Spain
?
Those are the countries where the best football is played but you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of successful British exports: John Charles, Kevin Keegan, David Platt, Liam Brady, Trevor Francis and perhaps David Beckham and Denis Law, although Denis only stayed a season in Italy and
Becks
struggled towards the end of last season. Most struggle because they’re all man-marked over there and they are not used to it, they’ve grown up with the lax defences and the helter-skelter nature of our game.

The foreign players demand high wages. That’s the cost of paying for world-class players. Gone are the days of home grown talent. You get the odd ones like Owen, Gerrard, Rooney, Wright-Phillips and the like but it’s hard to mention Arsenal and Chelsea and think of many home-grown players, particularly strikers, in their team. What does that tell you? It’s either the coaching in this country or the fact that we just play a different game over here?

Different players have different cultures and they all speak different languages. That’s why it’s been hard for a club like Chelsea, who have unlimited amounts of money, to win the league because there’s more to it than money.
Arsenal have
been very sensible – they must have four or five stars, mainly French, who speak English well. They have a much more settled dressing room and last season they seemed well ahead of any team in
England
.

Then again your wage bill depends on
Europe
because playing in
Europe
goes a long way to easing the finances of the club. As soon as
Leeds
failed to qualify for the Champions League they were propelled into financial misery.

The weekly wage bill at United could probably keep
Crewe
going for two or three years. It sounds silly but it’s true. There are so many clubs in debt now and if nothing is done soon then I can see a lot of players being let go at the end of the season and not being able to get another club.

Sooner or later the banks are going to pull the plug. In fact, we are starting to see this happen now with some clubs.
Notts
County
, the world’s oldest football club, have been battling for a few years. They’re still here… but only just.

It’s not too bad if your chairman is a billionaire such as
Abramovich
but if I were Scott Parker and I wasn’t able to get in that side I would be pig sick. He may collect forty grand a week or whatever but how does he feel sitting on the sidelines each week and what good is his inaction doing English football?

Another thing I notice from the comfort of my armchair is that many times I see a team fighting for survival in the league and the home team need three points. At 1-0 up, the coach or manager then takes off a forward and replaces him with a defender. That tells me he’s happy with one point. That he’s scared of losing so much that he’ll settle with what he’s got. Often it does end up 1-1 because of the signal it’s given to the other team to come and attack. I would consider that two points lost not one gained.

As attackers we were always trained to beat defenders. The best form of defence, as they say, is attack. I don’t know what it’s like today but in the 60s and 70s we used to train at
Cheadle
Town FC. We would concentrate on attack against defence every day in all weathers. At least one day a week we would go back to

Once the players start training on the pitch on a regular basis, the new ground will soon feel like home for them. We knew every single blade of grass at

Also, in those days everybody knew everybody else in the club, right down to the tea ladies. I’m not sure if that family atmosphere can ever return in a shiny new stadium. Every team that moves grounds seems to suffer for quite a time before they start getting results. Don’t forget they don’t have a
Kippax
now and I think the crowd are a bit further away, all of which makes a big difference to the atmosphere of the ground. If things had been different it might have been nice to have got married on the pitch. Probably very expensive to do but of course I would have had a blue suit on for the occasion. What other colour could I have worn?

*

To be a really good manager, you need a good knowledge of the game,
a knowledge
of how to change a game and a good knowledge of tactics generally. You also need to have the respect of the players and you need to befriend them early on so that they want to play for you and the club.

There were some horrendous stories when Alan Ball took over at City. Apparently he bounded into the dressing room and ranted: “I’m Alan Ball and I won the World Cup,” and started waving his medal about. He’s telling people like Tony
Coton
, Garry
Flitcroft
, Niall Quinn and Paul Walsh all this. I mean, do you honestly think anyone would respect someone who drones on about it all the time?

Malcolm Allison had the players’ respect. That’s the difference between him and someone like Ball. Also Joe Mercer tamed him. He was under Joe’s thumb. He could have ruined the club while we were there. Malcolm very nearly did ruin the club second time around but Joe and Malcolm gained respect because they were honest. Under George
Poyser
, players used to pick up the Manchester Evening News on a Friday and find out they’d been dropped – he didn’t have the courage to tell you face to face. That’s soul destroying for a player. That all changed when Joe came in.

The very least a manager should do is bring a player in and say: “Look, I’m not playing you this week. You need a rest.” All players want to play and essentially they are being dropped but there are ways a manager could and should soften the blow. Frankly, this ‘squad rotation’ nonsense is the most convenient excuse a manager can have for dropping a player. It makes it easy for them – they don’t have to come up with an explanation.

I think if Malcolm
were
a Premiership coach today and his team were playing someone like Arsenal, his instructions would be: “Crunch Henry in the first five or ten minutes because you hardly ever get sent off that early in a game. If you can get him carried off you stand a chance in the match.” It would be looking for the victory at all costs with Malcolm.

The alternative obviously would be to man mark him wherever he went but then you’d be a man down yourself. Now and again we’d use that tactic at City but only occasionally if we needed
Bestie
or Alan Ball marking out of a game. The player used on such occasions was Dave
Connor,
he was very good at that job which required a lot of discipline.

Another thing Malcolm used to do was watch the opposition and he would suss out who was the worst player with the ball at his feet and we would let that player have the ball on purpose.

When we started playing in
Europe
we widened the pitch because we had two very good wingers in Tony Coleman and Mike
Summerbee
. It gave them that little bit of extra room to weave their magic. Plus the fact that we were all comfortable on the ball aided our passing game. We were a good team going forward.

One particular manager at City narrowed the pitch back to what it was before and I think he must have had a very negative attitude. Either that or he didn’t have much confidence in the players at that time. In my mind that is such a defensive attitude to have because neither team have any space in which to express
themselves
. I suppose now that I am a coach to the players of tomorrow I can try and educate them into how I think the game should be played!

Many of the ex-City players attend the club’s golf day. I would dearly love to be part of this occasion but I have never been invited. Funnily enough, I am always invited to and regularly attend the Manchester United golf day and I am always well looked after when I go there, although I have always found the 19th hole the most rewarding!