Apparently we bid for Boniek first, after his performance against us for Widzew Lodz in the UEFA Cup the previous year, but the Polish communist authorities had a policy of allowing only older players to leave the country at that stage. Deyna was past his best when he came to us but still a fantastic talent. He played in central midfield in his pomp for Poland but struggled in that position initially at City. Malcolm eventually had the idea of switching him to a striking role and it was there that he put in some terrific performances for us. The BM records section shows he made 38 starts and 5 sub appearances for us in all competitions, scoring 13 goals, and that was a decent strike rate considering the number of those games he played in the middle of the park.
He also wasn't helped by the fact that, by the time he'd settled in, we'd sold off some very fine players and spent a fortune on inferior replacements. He then became simply too good for the team around him. I was ten years old at the time and without a finely honed tactical appreciation of the game, but I remember my old man telling me that it was like watching Denis Law in Law's first spell at City in terms of seeing a player on a completely different level from his team mates. And there's that famous quotation from the Clough protégé Alan Durban when he was managing Stoke. Deyna, he said, was tuned to Radio Four but the rest of City's players were tuned to Radio Luxemburg. If he'd come a year or two earlier and featured in Tony Book's fine mid- to late-seventies side, that might not have been the case.
