I went to my first game at Maine Road on the Boxing Day, six weeks after the League Cup derby, so I too was robbed of the chance to watch Colin in his prime. He had 48 caps by the age of 29 so I'm not quite sure that he'd have more than doubled his tally if he'd never been injured. I think he'd have managed 75 or 80, maybe. However, I think the effect on City was huge. IMO, we'd probably have claimed the league title in 1977 with a fit Colin Bell. Tony Book's City team of the mid and late seventies, which I grew up watching, was a 'nearly' team in many ways, winning just one League Cup and being runners up in the league by a point. I believe that Colin would have made the difference that would have turned what was a very, very good team into a great one.
The tackle itself is clearly a really poor one. Buchan comes flying in with studs raised, and is completely reckless. However, I don't think he deliberately sets out to 'do' Bell, as some Blues claim. I see it as a spur-of-the-moment foul, desperately launching himself to try and stop Bell before he gets into the penalty area - City have men up in support, and if Bell goes on he'll probably fashion a good scoring opportunity. That said, if one of our players had caused an injury like that to a United great in a derby, we'd never hear the end of it, even nearly four decades later.
While Blues focus on Buchan's role in this sorry story, though, to me the real tragedy lies in the idea that City may have mishandled the injury. It was a clearly a serious one, but would it have been career-ending if it had been treated differently? As is mentioned in this thread, Colin returned to action five months later, in April the same season, breaking down at Arsenal in the fourth game of his comeback. Bell is on record as saying that City were pushing him to play again at the earliest possible date, and he knew he wasn't ready. It breaks my heart to think of this, as it does to read of the way the club handled Paul Lake's injury later.
I also remember the comeback game against Newcastle on Boxing Day 1977, which one or two mention on this thread. I doubt anyone who was there will ever forget it. Must surely have been one of the most memorable and emotional games that ever took place in City's eight decades at Maine Road. But that deserves its own thread, really (and there have been one or two threads about it in the past, in fact).
IcriedwhenTueartleft said:
my first game was a 4-3 win over Derby at home, possibly April 1976....pretty sure that Bell played in that match but was clearly only half fit. My hero Dennis the menace ran half the length of the pitch, rounded their keeper and squeezed it home from a tight angle to make it 4-2. Great first game to go for a 14 year old from Aberdeen. Oddly, about 20 years later I was working with this guy in Edinburgh who was the same age as me and he was telling me that he'd only ever been to one English match when he'd been in the Scottish Schoolboys under 16's squad and they'd played in Manchester and then gone to the same game in the afternoon....
This was the first game of Bell's abortive comeback towards the end of the 1975/6 season. There's footage online courtesy of the excellent mcfcvideos youtube channel. You can see Bell congratulating the City scorers, putting in a long diagonal ball from which City eventually score their second, and he's also there back in defence when Derby score their second and third goals.
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uqfHEzDPKE[/video]