Fowlers Penalty Miss said:
No. it's not a lack of debate that intrigues me, and I read your post and found it interesting and informative. I'm not so closed that I can't change my mind about things, but Lee did give us Alan Ball as our manager. Surely that on it's own is enough for a fan like me, who is not privy to the inner workings of our club, to think our chairman at the time was a bit unhinged.
Jobs for the Boys and all that.
Yes, I cared as much about City then as I do now, but Lee wasn't perfect.
Lee made a number of mistakes and I'd never say he was perfect. He was very self-confident and believed he'd be successful, in part I think because he felt that his background would be a big help to him in terms of understanding the football side. Yet in fact, he made some bad football decisions that undermined the rest of what he was trying to achieve. I actually think he was too indecisive with Brian Horton, who should have been either sacked in the summer of 1994 or properly backed, rather than left in post with constant speculation about his tenure and half-hearted statements of support from the club (along the lines that "the board hasn't discussed the manager's position").
Anyway, there's a book, Blue Moon Rising, that tells the story of City in the 1990s up to winning promotion back to the PL in 2000: <a class="postlink" href="http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Moon-Rising-Fall-Manchester/dp/0953084744" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Moon-Rising- ... 0953084744</a>
The two authors were two local journalists who covered the club in those days, and it has a lot of interviews with key protagonists. It also doesn't make judgements - it pretty well lets the parties involved speak for themsleves (or Swales's widow speak for him, in his case) and leaves readers to make up their own minds. It suggests that Lee had someone else lined up to replace Horton but was let down. That's almost certainly Brian Kidd, IMO. There have been threads about it in the past on here (I may see if I can find one at some point, but something has just happened that means I must dash off the rest of this post and then get to it). Apparently, United wouldn't release Kidd from his contract and he wasn't prepared to walk out.
Kidd would have been hailed as a top appointment at the time, because popular opinion had him down as a major influence on United's success. However, a couple of years later, he took over a better group of players at Blackburn than he'd have had at City, had more money to spend there than we'd have given him, and bombed anyway, taking them down. This all suggests that he'd probably have struggled with us.
The difference with Ball was that most fans were underwhelmed with the appointment when it happened, which wouldn't have been the case with Kidd. I remember trying to look for the positives and suggesting there was hope in the fact that Ball had joined Southampton at more or less the time Lee joined City, had assumed control with them in severe relegation trouble, avoided the drop and finished mid-table the following year. But no, like loads of others I always feared the worst from that appointment. I personally was advocating Mick McCarthy, then in his first job at Millwall, or Martin O'Neill, who'd taken Wycombe to the greatest heights in their history.
Both a risk, admittedly, having never managed at the top level. However, there were no real proven managers available that summer and I felt that an up-and-coming young coach would have been a better bet than someone with Ball's rather chequered managerial past.
