Vienna_70 said:
oakiecokie said:
Although not a player,still a true City Legend,but do I remember Big Mal giving an interviw once and saying that he had been a massive City fan long before he joined the Blues ??
Almost certain he was a fan from the 1940s,even as a London lad !!
Anyone confirm or dispute this please ?
Big Mal is quoted as saying that in "
Football with a Smile, Gary James wonderful biography of Sir Joe, page 175 of the hardback version.
He'd listened to the radio commentary when City lost the FA Cup final to Everton in 193: and City was his team.
The Big Mal quote is now on page 182 of the new version of the book (Joe Mercer, OBE: Football With A Smile, ISBN 9780955812743) and it came from an interview I did with Allison in his flat in Yarm in late 1992/early 1993.
I was interviewing Mal about Joe and he said that he had been a City fan ever since hearing them in the 1933 FA Cup final. Usually, when a big name former player/manager says something like that I focus in on it because, as fans, this sort of thing is important. Sometimes a player will say 'I've always wanted to play for Utd/Liverpool/Chelsea/City... because it's my team' and you know it's an absolute lie, so I questioned Mal as much as I could (without annoying him of course!).
In my mind when he first said it I couldn't believe Mal was a Blue as a boy (he came from Dartford etc.) and I'd never read or heard him say it to anyone else before, so I had to try and work out if this was the truth or a nice story being spun for the purpose of the interview.
In the end, everything he said made sense and I came away convinced he was talking factually. I couldn't put all of this in the book because it's about Joe and not City in the 30s but the general comments made by Mal were something like:
- I always supported the underdog and in that final against Everton, City were overwhelmed by Everton and Dixie Dean.
- I remember City's captain Sam Cowan.
- I listened to it on the radio and it was the first final I remember being seriously interested in.
- From that day they became 'my team'. City was always 'my team' from then on.
- The underdog soon found success - winning the Cup and then the League - and that probably cemented them as 'my team'
- A few years later I saw them and the blue of their shirts was such a great colour, that reinforced it.
I published part of that story (plus loads of other material from our interview) in my first version of the Mercer book in 1993 and I've just updated the book and added some more material from that interview and others.
After the first edition of the book was published I saw in other, later publications different, exaggerated stories of Mal being a Blue because he'd seen film of City in the 1933 final (some have said 1934) and so on.
Back in 1992/3 Mal was adamant that he listened to the radio commentary and that's what made him a Blue. Mal appeared on film around 2000 talking about this as well.
I have the original interview recorded on cassette and I really should dig that and some of my other interviews out and get them copied into sound files at some point.
I'll be talking in the Joe Mercer Suite at Goodison Park on Friday night (see <a class="postlink" href="http://www.manchesterfootball.org" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">www.manchesterfootball.org</a>) and will be telling a few stories connected with my interviews with Mal, Joe, Tom Finney, George Graham etc.
