Just love this pic...

Dogtanian said:
12654595_10153913005943826_1290812776740267029_n.jpg
Click to expand...

Every picture tells a story...and that one just about sums up the Swales era - the "main" man front and centre complete with his shredded wheat, his faithful yes-men behind him leading the club on to erm... near-oblivion. Hang on, it's a football club, best stick the players in somewhere - oh yes the back corner, don't want them thinking they're important.

Did Tony Book often get dressed blindfolded, I wonder?

The year must be around 77 or 78, just before Mal's return.
 
lancs blue said:
Every picture tells a story...and that one just about sums up the Swales era - the "main" man front and centre complete with his shredded wheat, his faithful yes-men behind him leading the club on to erm... near-oblivion. Hang on, it's a football club, best stick the players in somewhere - oh yes the back corner, don't want them thinking they're important.

Did Tony Book often get dressed blindfolded, I wonder?

The year must be around 77 or 78, just before Mal's return.
Click to expand...

It's the summer or autumn of 1977. You can tell that it's the squad of 1977/8 by the fact that Mick Channon is on it, who signed in the summer of 1977, and Mike Doyle, who left in the summer of 1978.

That photo was actually taken to commemorate a weekly feature run by the BBC's national teatime news magazine show, Nationwide, in autumn 1977. They were looking for a top football club to grant them behind-the-scenes access for a series of short fly-on-the-wall type films and City were chosen. I remember them saying at the time that they picked us because, out of the several interested Division One clubs they spoke to, we were the only one not to demand a degree of editorial control. The most notable segment was probably the one showing Colin Bell as he battled back from injury and tried to get fit to play again (probably shown a couple of months before his comeback against Newcastle), but it ran over several weeks and they showed all kinds of things. From memory, one evening they devoted the film to the two women who were responsible for washing the kit. I'd love to see them again, but, unlike the Granada documentary from 1981, I don't think they're available.

Nationwide produced a book (well, more of a kind of brochure) to commemorate this series, and I had a copy for years, though I've no idea what's happened to it now. It was for that brochure that they took the photo. The aim, of the photo and of the feature overall, was to show that a football club was about much more than the eleven blokes on the pitch every Saturday.
 
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