Gary James said:
Thanks. There's also a very long interview with me on EPL Talk:
http://www.epltalk.com/interview-with-gary-james-football-historian-and-author/13357. If you've got a hour to spare....
I personally listened to that one sometime before Xmas, but would recommend it without hesitation to anyone who hasn't heard it and is interested in their City history and Manchester football history generally.
Incidentally, the part of the interview on the Everton site where you talk about how Joe was treated when leaving City and then afterwards through the 1980s when he was ignored by the club really does show up the people in the City boardroom for what they were. No news there, of course, but I'm curious to know what you think of Malcolm's role. (Obviously it will be covered in the book, so I'm not asking for much detail). There have been a couple of 'faction' Damned United-style books about the era of the break up of the partnership recently, which I haven't read - but the title of Colin Shindler's certainly suggests that his charts an acrimonious parting. I think that's the impression most people seem to have had down the years.
Someone posted recently that interview with Joe not that long before his death in which, I noted with interest, he says he never had a cross word with Mal and talks fondly about him. Presumably, then, there was no lasting resentment on Joe's side. Was that because he'd put any acrimony against Allison behind him by that stage, or because it was never realy there? And could Malcolm have done more to stop the board treating Joe as they did?
Incidentally, Shankly won six major trophies in his career, including one UEFA Cup, plus one promotion. Joe had five if you include the League Cup at Villa and the one promotion, so I reckon he can definitely be spoken of in the same breath. Shankly is so important at Liverpool because he set them up for an era in which they prospered to an even greater degree than under him - but had he not been there first, the later era would never have been possible. With us, things obviously took a different turn, but it should really be something along similar lines.
Towards the end of the seventies, we were attracting comfortably the third biggest gates in the country behind United and Liverpool, had a stadium regularly chosen above Old Trafford for FA Cup semi finals, one of the best squads in the country and had a successful youth policy too. We'd never have been there without the achievements of Joe and Malcolm, who took a club on its uppers and turned it round completely. It still infuriates me to this day when I think of the inane self-destruction through which we simply pissed that away.
Incidentally - to put Joe's four major trophies at City in perspective. When we won the League Cup in 1976, it was our ninth, almost half of them gained on Joe's watch. Up to the summer of 1976, in each club's entire history, Spurs and Everton had won ten, United eleven and Liverpool thirteen. Villa had four (one under Mercer) since the end of WW1 and one of those had been in 1920.
In other words, Mercer's period of management put us on a level where for trophies, we were more or less on a par with even the biggest clubs. It's what happened in the eighties and since that allows these goons to come on here and claim we have no history. But then the fact that a man, in Peter Swales, who played a major factor in the disgraceful shoddiness of Mercer's departure should be the man who comprehensively managed to damage the great man's legacy is perhaps unsurprising.
