MANCHESTER CITY: MY TEAM

TITLE           Manchester City: My Team
AUTHOR          Mike Doyle
PUBLISHER       Readers Union Limited.
                P.O. Box 6,
                Newton Abbot,
                Devon TQ12 2DW
                England
ISBN            Number not known
PRICE           Out of print

My copy of this autobiography cost me £4.50 from a secondhand (football) book dealer so this probably represents the going rate (March '95). I should also point out that this version was published through a book club in 1978 and has no ISBN number; the original appeared in 1977 and came from Souvenir Press.

The book is in A5-ish format with a pretty lurid green binding (hardback) and the obligatory light blue dust jacket with our hero on the front. It's a little lightweight for an autobiography considering its format, with 173 pages and 27 black & white photographs. It's split up into 16 chapters starting with a very brief description of his early years and his arrival at Maine Road, marked for posterity by a whack round the ear from one Bert Trautmann! He tells of the shambolic state of the club under the famously aloof Les McDowall and the amiable George Poyser. The big event is of course the arrival of Mercer & Allison and the sea-change which they brought about. Here it becomes clear that Doyle, although at pains to stress his admiration for Allison - the coach, clearly shows his antipathy for Allison - the man. This inability to hit it off with Big Mal resulted in an episode that is made even more amazing by the fact that the press never got a sniff of it and it was big news! Doyle verbally agreed over the 'phone (with Frank O'Farrell, then Big Mal) to sign for... the Rags, but the deal mysteriously fell through. Doyle turned up at Maine Road expecting to be sent to the Swamp but nothing happened, nor was it ever mentioned again!

From here on in the book tends to take the form of a conversation, with Doyle recounting various incidents and his thoughts on certain players and the game as a whole, retaining only a superficial chronology. Chapter Four is spent explaining how he became lumbered, totally unjustly, with the reputation of hating all things Manchester United. This was basically a press invention which was to cause him quite a lot of grief over the years. He has some surprising things to say about other players, for instance that City never worried about George Best because Tony Book always played him out of the game! He says his piece on the rapid progression from Mercer through to Saunders and the latter's unceremonious sacking. You'll never guess who comes out of this as a knight and gentleman extraordinaire? None other than Peter Swales, a man Doyle can't praise enough! This is the other side of the coin to the story told in 'The Battle for Manchester City', where Swales' handling of Saunders' firing is supposed to have turned Frannie against him.

Somewhat confusingly, Marsh, Saunders et al., are discussed before a small chapter on lifting the league title, an event which happened several years previously! He now reverts to a standard biography for a couple of chapters and talks about City's continental adventures but this degenerates into a somewhat dismissive attack on the way Johnny Foreigner likes to play his football. It all sounds a little parochial to me as I'm sure there were plenty of hard, uncompromising thugs in the English game at the time. He fits in a chapter here on bad tackles and bad refereeing, obviously something that irritates him.

After discussing his short England career and his admiration for Don Revie, the next chapter is back to the FA Cup in '69! This is followed by a few pages on Joe Corrigan who he describes as 'the worst goalkeeper he had ever seen' and who eventually became 'the best he had ever seen in England.' We get a nice description of events leading up to the League Cup success and then onto a personal attack on Jimmy Hill. Some of you may remember how he (Hill) singled out Brian Kidd on TV as a dirty player (unjustified), an act which had a direct and detrimental bearing on his form and on City's championship challenge. This criticism is quite justified as I still shake my head now at Hill and how he set himself up as some kind of self-appointed arbiter of fair play... yuk! Lastly, he has a go at referees and authority, another of his bugbears. Curiously, these latter figures are all named whereas he recounts several tales about City players (non-damaging) in early chapters where he deliberately omits to name the individual!

As a biography (is it a biography at all?) the book is pretty weak and is written in a very haphazard fashion; it has the feel of someone recounting past exploits over a pint in a pub. The man himself comes across as being a little parochial, dourly disapproving of the champagne antics of Lee, Allison & Summerbee and having a strong belief in his own righteousness. In spite of its obvious flaws, the book makes for very interesting reading and contains many priceless anecdotes and important pieces of the MCFC story. One last thought, the book was written before the disastrous return of Big Mal and I can't help speculating whether it ended up playing a rôle in Doyle's departure to Stoke!