CUPS FOR COCK-UPS

TITLE           Cups for Cock-Ups
AUTHOR          Ashley Shaw
PUBLISHER       Empire Publications Ltd.
                Empire House
                62 Charles Street
                Manchester
                M1 7DF
                Tel: 0161 273 7007
                Fax: 0161 273 5007
                Email: empire@globalnet.co.uk
ISBN No         1-901746-04-4
PRICE           £8.99

I bought this really good book the other day. I think it's just been published. It's called Cups For Cock Ups by Ashley Shaw and it costs £8.99. The publishers are Empire Publications. I bought it from my local bookstore so I guess it's widely available. It's mostly about last season and it's got loads of pics in it. It's funny and tragic at the same time. Any City fan who lived through those turbulent times will identify with the book. There's interviews with loads of people connected with the club, including fans! Dave Wallace (The KoK) is interviewed. Good Christmas Pressie!

I would go along with everything John Hacking said. It's a brill book and will make a great Xmas pressy and I don't work for the publisher.

This book is definitely not a Christmas present for a Man. City supporter. That is unless you are a Man. Utd. fan who wants cheap laughs at our loyalty. The author is a self-confessed Man. Utd. supporter who delights in repeating how City is in the doldrums whilst Utd. are "winning cup after cup".

The problem for us City fans is that the statements in the book are probably true. We are in this unenviable position in our football skills and financially bereft, due to bad managers and weak, out-of-touch directors. As we are reminded, our derby games are not even against Bury or Stockport, rather Macclesfield and Wigan, whilst Utd. have won this and that, play in Europe etc. We don't read this once, but over and over again.

Whilst being in essence true, do we want to give our friends such a present? Reading the book made me feel miserable. I know City are bad but I don't need a Man. Utd. author to rub it in for me. Our celebrity supporters are referred to as ageing comedians or second rate soap stars and predicts that Liam will be watching us in the Vauxhall Conference. Maine Road is referred to as the 'Theatre of Comedies'. And we are reminded that our results get worse; defeats against such giants of the game as Crewe. '...giants of the game as Crewe'. That's his sarcastic quotation.

Doesn't the Utd. author betray his true motive here of rubbishing City? There is even a full chapter itemising the games leading to our relegation to Div. 2. Bet he loved writing that. Do you want to read it? He blames the 30,000 fan attendances for the Board thinking this is tacit acceptance of the situation, and things will get no better if we continue to turn up. And in another place he says when the attendance does start to drop we will go in the way of Burnley and Preston. A Catch 22 which I think is what Ashley Shaw wants, our demise. Reason? Well, it's as he states in his book, there are more City shirts to be seen in Manchester than there are of Utd. That must hurt him. Buy the book, read it, give the Utd. author a share of the £8.99 (you can have my copy for £5), but give it for a present as is being suggested, certainly not. If you had given me this book for Christmas, I'd break it over your head.

A week off and a chance to recharge the batteries by spending some time outside crisis-torn Russia meant I ended up doing a lot of reading. Almost all of it was football-based and in addition to the Deloitte & Touche survey of football club accounts I read journalist Derrick Alsop's inside view of a year in the life of his local team Rochdale and a similar account (co-authored by Alex Fynn, a well-known football consultant) of a year at Tottenham Hotspur. I'd recommend both as offering a behind-the-scenes insight at the respective ends of the football spectrum. Fynn deals with issues like the implications of a flotation for a football club and the rôle of agents in transfers worth millions. Alsop describes how the Rochdale manager is concerned with finding a pitch for his team to train on and how the players take their own sandwiches on the team coach to Torquay.

In the penultimate match of my first full season watching City, we demolished Spurs 5-0, and as little as six years ago we were facing them in an FA Cup quarter final which many pundits and neutrals expected us to win. Last Saturday I travelled up to Manchester to see us take on opponents who've spent most of their history dreaming that one day they might reach the same league as Rochdale. In terms of support and tradition, we have much more in common with the Spurs of this world. It's a reasonable supposition, then, that the story of how we've come (entirely deservedly) to be rubbing shoulders with opponents who have much more in common with Rochdale could be the subject of a pretty interesting book. Ashley Shaw's 'Cups for Cock-Ups', the third football tome I consumed in the last week, aims to be that book.

In the latest Bert Trautmann's Helmet Noel Bayley dismissed Shaw's efforts as a "red book in a blue cover" and I read this review before I read the book itself. Shaw, you see, is a Manchester United fan, and regularly punctuates the litany of City disasters with comparisons to United triumphs. The author would no doubt retort that, as the most successful club of the nineties both on and off the pitch, they provide a useful counterpoint which puts into sharper focus City's failings in both departments. Nevertheless, he does overdo it and there are one or two occasions where he reflects on aspects of City fans' feelings towards United despite his musings having no relevance whatsoever to the point at hand. For example, when making the perfectly valid point that in an age where United have aroused the hostility of many all around the country City's image is helped by being their traditional rivals, Shaw is unable to resist a lengthy swipe at the "localised jealousy" of City fans. Whether or not this is fair comment, it's immaterial to the argument.

While this was obviously a major flaw in Noel's eyes, for me it was a relatively minor irritant and I found other failings which rankled more. For example, mistakes in written English go with the territory in fanzines or interactive online forums, but they annoy me in a book like this. Surely the publisher ought to employ people who can eradicate the use of "principle" where it should be "principal", "it's" instead of "its" or "reign" in place of "rein". I know this is probably a minor issue for most people, but it does convey a slightly shoddy impression. More serious, and damaging to authorial credibility, are factual errors. Shaw states that Paul Simpson, who made his first-team début in 1982, was part of the successful 1986 youth side, he tells us that Dave Shindler wrote "Manchester United Ruined My Life", he includes Crewe in a list of visitors who won at Maine Road last season and he affirms that we'll be playing Shrewsbury Town in the league this season. If this is the extent of his knowledge, is he really the man to analyse where it all went wrong for City?

Doubts as to Shaw's aptitude for the task intensify when he displays a complete lack of authority in discussing the boardroom and corporate issues which have had such an impact on life at Manchester City in the last few years. The most glaring of several examples comes when Shaw says that Francis Lee took a twelve per cent stake in return for loaning the club money. This just isn't true. Lee, together with Colin Barlow and John Dunkerley, paid Swales and Boler the going rate for a 29.9% holding in the club, of which the chairman owned roughly two thirds. Lee's personal sake, of course, was diluted to 12% by a subsequent share issue. The loan of funds to the club, which enabled City to avoid relegation in 1994 by signing Rösler, Walsh and Beagrie, was separate from the share purchase. Again, maybe this inaccuracy seems fairly minor in itself, but it's symptomatic of a lack of clarity on Shaw's part as to the way the football business works. And that's important, because this lack of clarity is at the root of the book's failure to provide an authoritative account of City's decline.

It can be seen in contradictory statements throughout the book. For example, we're told early on that flotation is the only way forward for major football clubs in the nineties, which is in itself a proposition which could be argued at length. At the end of the book, though, Shaw is talking enthusiastically about the club being owned by the fans rather than by investors who are motivated purely by profit. It's not clear to me how Shaw squares the two statements in his own mind. What seems a better bet is that he doesn't really understand the implications of either statement.

This lack of knowledge is presumably what makes Shaw appear over-reliant on his interviewees. So we have Mike McDonald, the only real alternative to Lee back in 1993-94, implying he'd have done a much better job. We have Raymond Donn, at the time hoping to put together a takeover bid, expansively revealing his vision of the future. We have Dante Friend, a leading light in the Free the Manchester 30,000 movement, talking about the influence of fan power. And we have Dave Wallace, reflecting that the board should have consulted with him, as "fan on the board", over managerial appointments. If Shaw weighed up their arguments authoritatively, then agreed with them, I wouldn't complain about the approach. Unfortunately, he lacks either the inclination or the critical faculty even to question even the most contentious elements of what he's told.

The clearest of several instances comes when he refers to the eventual removal of Lee as having been forced by the City fans and gives Dante Friend, who incidentally wrote the book's foreword, an uncritical platform to recount the aims and activities of the Free the Manchester 30,000 movement. Lee may have become an unpopular figure after four disastrous years but he showed no sign of being swayed from his determination to remain chairman by supporter pressure. I firmly believe (and am confident that most sensible observers would agree) that boardroom politics were the only reason for his demise, and I doubt that City historians of the future will record Free the 30,000 as having been instrumental in anything at all. In similar vein, Shaw's treatment of McDonald and Donn is totally uncritical, while the fan on the board issue is given a very lengthy airing when to me (and I suspect most City fans) it would merit only a footnote in the chronicles of the Lee years.

The weakness is magnified as all of Shaw's interviewees would naturally be expected to be fairly hostile to the Lee regime and there's a consequent lack of balance. The point isn't whether Shaw is right or wrong in condemning Lee, but if he wants to take this stance he should examine what mitigating arguments Lee might offer and explain why he rejects them. Moreover, Shaw tends to ignore completely any episodes where none of his interviewees can provide any insight. For example, there was protracted takeover speculation in the summer and autumn of 1996 and a question I've had ever since is whether any interested party could credibly have offered the club an injection of funds and a new direction. If so, was Lee receptive or obstructive? My own judgement of Lee could change significantly depending on the answers. It doesn't even occur to Shaw to ask the questions.

Despite these very major criticisms, it would be unfair to say that the book has no redeeming feature. Shaw had access to people with an interesting insight and this is the saving grace of "Cups for Cock-Ups". The interviews with Donn (if you can cut your way through the gushing descriptions of his LA Law-style offices on Deansgate(!) and his plans for a glittering, continental-style academy of footballing science in Moss Side) and McDonald shed light on two men who could easily have become City chairman. In particular, the information surrounding McDonald's first bid for City is new and illuminating. I never knew, for instance, that after concluding a deal to buy a 52% holding in the club, McDonald had not only set up the White/Rocastle swap deal which went through a couple of weeks later, but had also arranged for Noel Whelan to come to Maine Road as part of the package. On the other hand, nine quid is a lot to pay for a book whose major merit is a couple of mildly interesting pieces of new information.

One of the reviews of the Alex Fynn book said it was a benchmark against which all football books of its type could be judged, and as I think that's a fair comment, I'll end by comparing it to Shaw's efforts. For £6.99, Fynn offers over 400 pages well-written and well-argued insight into the modern game at top level, from a man whose background makes him well worth listening to on the topic. For £8.99, Shaw offers 170 pages which don't even begin to approach a similar standard, with unsatisfactory reasoning to back up fairly mundane conclusions - that Swales mismanaged the club, Lee didn't have enough money, couldn't get rid of some people who needed to be removed and made some mistakes (tell us something we don't know!). I expressed the view that there's a great book begging to be written about City's torments - there's certainly scope for an authoritative and compelling treatment of a decline which has been swift, dramatic and brutally disappointing. Unfortunately, "Cups for Cock-Ups" is well wide of the mark.