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PREFACE
Garden dogs.
I wondered if the rain would hold off for the evening's torture, a date in the diary secured but a few weeks earlier when City had dismantled, undressed, and crapped royally and from great height upon the famous Real of Madrid. They had played, in the first half especially, a level of football that I had not seen from any team, internationally or otherwise, in my fifty-something years watching grown men in shorts kick around an inflatable leatherette sphere, and I have not seen anything remotely close to it since. I am not quite sure how a football team achieves that level of exquisite perfection, whether it was the incomparable genius of the Catalan magician, Pep Guardiola, or the collision of a collection of sublime football talents operating simultaneously at their primes, peaking at precisely the same time and on the same barmy early summer Mancunian evening. Both, I think. It matters not; it was indeed a masterclass beyond any other, and my eyes moisten easily on the many occasions I rewatch the highlights.
Wandering around the garden, then, pretending I was living a typical Saturday as opposed to a circular fever dream, I was casting around for trivial and distracting tasks for myself, like reorganising fallen leaves and polishing the bushes, almost anything to alleviate the unrelenting tension. There was a deepening anxiety about what lay ahead that coming evening, thousands of miles away in boiling Istanbul, whilst the Black Dog hovered, as he always has, never missing an opportunity to get inside my head and find my tripwire. City had recently secured a three-peat league title after Arsenal surrendered again, completing the league and cup double, the latter by beating the Rags at Wembley the previous Saturday. It was outstanding preparation for this final European tie of the campaign. The principal problem was that the level of sporting jeopardy was now as extreme as extreme can be, perched upon a knife-edge with either a precipitous fall into a lifetime of cruel bottler jibes on the one side, or, if the gods smiled on us, a version of joy on the other that only a time-served, obsessed football supporter could appreciate. On the line was a historic Treble and one false step, one error, something hideous and dredged back into existence from the diabolical, toxic circus days of City's 1990s, perhaps, and the entire thing could explode in our faces. I dared not imagine winning; oh, the humanity. Nor would my cruel mind permit any sense of optimism, the inner chorus of demon voices preferring instead to repeatedly suggest likely disaster scenarios, all the while intensifying the crushing presence of impending doom. I told myself that our Italian opponents, Internazionale of Milan, were the most incredible team ever to play the game and that the devastation felt two years previously amidst the Porto shit show would once again visit upon us its unmatched misery.
Irrationality on this scale is, in essence, what it is to follow City; no matter the contemporary successes and no matter the ancient failures. It is what it is to be City, and here I was, in a garden, in Coventry, furiously tamping down a rising sense of gloom and panic about a football team at that moment without an equal anywhere on the planet. I noted the time every seven minutes, or less, on each occasion, concluding that cracking open a cold beer would not be entirely unreasonable. It was eight thirty in the morning. Sergio Kun Aguero and Vincent Kompany were with me, undoubted legends both, so there were some moments of slight distraction in between the leaves organising and bush polishing, and their non-judgemental furry input throughout the tortuous late afternoon hours as I counted down time for the taxi to take us over to Clare’s, our daughter, for the match and the medicinal alcohol, was welcome. Sergio and Vinnie are French Bulldogs, real, actual dogs with fur and paws, neither remotely like the thing lurking inside my skull with its never-ending threats.
Fifty-three years previously, I was dozing in my bed one evening, the smell of freshly hung wallpaper holding my interest as I picked meaningfully at a wing of Thunderbird 2. There were plenty of others, I reasoned, as the entire wall had a fabulous repeating pattern of Thunderbirds, my mother having skilfully hung each fresh roll of wallpaper that afternoon. Mum always seemed good at stuff like decorating. Dad, who never did, poked his head around the door, his face beaming, his arms full of strange gifts from a distant land. There was a tub of small spherical sweets and a bar of what I assumed to be chocolate, the writing on the wrapper appearing to be in some foreign language. Dad, you see, had been in Vienna the night before for the 1970 European Cup Winners’ Cup Final, where City had become the first English side to win a domestic and European trophy in the same season, what I now know to be part of City's first golden era. Years later, he would recount stories of how he and his pals drank the hotel bar so dry that the overworked landlord went out and returned with an actual wheelbarrow brimming with fresh supplies. Earlier, they had performed a massive conga, the highlight being the debaucherous line making its way through, yes, through, a local taxicab. Fabulous.
I was five years old, with no real grasp of football beyond knowing that Dad was often absent on Saturdays and sometimes on Tuesdays or Wednesdays. I knew he was having a good time because I frequently found newspapers around the house with pictures of City players holding aloft vast silver trophies, plural. I had a home kit replete with socks tipped in maroon and white, everything a lad could want, and I would tear around our garden, as yet without deciding I was any specific player. However, I would become either Colin Bell, Francis Lee, or Mike Summerbee in the next few years. I had no idea of the vast canvas of extraordinary football experiences that lay in front of me in the coming decades, the unbelievable rollercoaster of punishment, the joys, and, all those years later and after the garden anxiety with the trio of dogs, the pinnacle of my entire football-supporting life. That was when all the wildest football lottery fantasy win dreams came true with one carefully crafted swish of a young Spaniard's boot. Thank you, Rodri, thank you.
So, lend me your eyes, and I will write my story, a memoir of a lifetime, where, in my 61st year, I can relate life events precisely to a particular match or to where City were in their Great Struggle™. Scarily, I can pick out almost any moment from my life and tie it to an event involving Manchester City. If someone mentions, for example, something from 1976, I will immediately do the required mental gymnastics and warp back in time to what City were doing almost precisely at that moment. It's not normal, I know, but it is what it is - a bizarre obsession, perhaps a gift or a skill, or something simple like a fabulous mental construct where I have assembled order in my life through the trials and tribulations of a professional football club. If this is so, I picked an absolute basket case of a club with which to 'assimilate', a life partner sent to test my character and patience thoroughly.
Only I did not pick them. The law presented City as the only football option to choose, such was and is the law amongst many generations of my family. Born in Manchester in 1964 on Parr’s Wood Road in Didsbury, I spent my first four years on Earth but a couple of miles from the hallowed confines of Maine Road. As my Dad would often say, and with a level of seriousness that only he could muster, my first words were, 'Up the Blues'. Uh-huh.
So, this is my story, and every single word is true.
Michael James Rennie. 2025.
