‘Typical City’ might have been muttered by a few of the visiting fans who sought to leave the Hill Dickinson Stadium at 3-1 on Monday night.
We doubt, though, that many of those overly entitled early darters at Everton would be familiar with their team’s past tendency to shoot themselves in one foot before taking aim at the other.
Pep Guardiola has made the ‘Typical City’ adage somewhat redundant in recent times. But before east Manchester was awash with oil money, City’s propensity for hapless self-sabotage seemed incurable. It ran through their DNA.
Never more did it seem so than 30 years ago, on May 5 1996, when Alan Ball’s Blues played keep-ball in the corner, running down the clock against Liverpool to kill time they could not afford to lose on the way to Division One.
This was before City versus Liverpool was a global event; when English football was more familiar with a Big Five – featuring Everton – than any notion of a Big Six.
Indeed, this 2-2 draw with Roy Evans’ Reds condemned City to relegation, sending them spiralling into the wilderness years, during which the prospect of ever being taken seriously again, never mind becoming one of football’s global elite, was too fanciful to be anything but funny.
City looked relegation certs for much of the 1995-96 season. It began with Ball’s appointment, the 1966 World Cup winner pinched from Southampton, prompting a furious reaction from Saints while being greeted with suspicion by City fans owing to their new manager’s pally relationship with owner Franny Lee.
Taking over a team that finished 17th the season prior, Ball said that his new job made him “the envy of millions”, giving United fans some much-needed cheer amid their own crisis in the summer of 1995, when Alex Ferguson reacted to blowing the Double by shedding star names to replace them with kids.
Few would have swapped places with Ball while his City side started the season with an 11-game winless run, taking only two points up to Bonfire weekend. Their 11th and final game before finally tasting victory: a 6-0 shellacking at Liverpool.
One win, though, prompted four and a draw from five matches as summer signing Georgi Kinkladze found his feet, the Georgian helping City to lift themselves off the bottom of the table and spend the remaining five months of the season bobbing either side of the relegation line.
In that time, only once did City win or lose consecutive matches, but when they eventually found consistency during the run-in, it was the wrong sort.
Losing three, drawing one in a four-game stretch before the final three left City facing what appeared to be a losing battle. So, to the surprise of everyone and no one, they won their next two to set up a final day relegation shoot-out.
TABLE BEFORE 1995-96 FINAL DAY
To survive, against Liverpool at Maine Road, City would have to better the results of one of Southampton – Ball’s old side – or Coventry, with Saints hosting Wimbledon and the Sky Blues welcoming Leeds United.
Goalless draws at Southampton and Coventry left the door open for City, who didn’t just fail to take their escape route; they walked into the wall, treading on rakes en route.
Liverpool, third in the table with no prospect of moving up or down, turned up at Maine Road a week after Oasis did.
On the penultimate weekend of the Premier League season, April 27 and 28, Liam, Noel and co. put on two era-defining gigs at the home of their beloved City. The highlight of the Gallagher brothers’ lives, apparently. Biblical.
Why, though, no one thought to schedule the shows after City’s last game while Oasis had three months off before Knebworth, is anyone’s guess.
What difference did it make? According to City’s own account of the game, there was ‘noticeable compression’ on the pitch at the Platt Lane End, where the stage had been set up by 51 trucks and a giant shipyard crane.
It was at that end where Steve Lomas tripped over himself to score an early own-goal and Ian Rush netted – via a heavy deflection – before half-time to give Liverpool a 2-0 lead at half-time. All very ‘typical’ so far.
It wasn’t as if City weren’t pushing. Niall Quinn, Uwe Rosler and Nigel Clough all went close in a first half concluded with boos from the home supporters, the euphoria of a week ago a distant memory.
The second half was played in a similar end-to-end manner, desperate City against a Liverpool side playing with freedom and minimal motivation, only the FA Cup final against United a week later to worry them.
City grabbed a lifeline on 71 minutes, Kinkladze’s mazy dribble ended unceremoniously by Neil Ruddock. Rosler channelled all the resentment from his fued with Ball into the spot-kick, blasting it down the middle to give City hope.
Eight minutes later, Kit Symonds smashed City level. A great escape was on.
But someone, still nameless three decades on, believed a draw to be enough. Apparently, from a fan tuned into events elsewhere on the radio, word had reached the City bench that Wimbledon were leading at Southampton and a draw was enough to stay up.
Rosler recalled: “We needed a third, but with a few minutes remaining, we got an instruction from the bench to hold the ball in the corner and waste time as they’d heard Wimbledon had taken the lead at Southampton.”
Lomas remembers getting the duff information: “Alan Ball called me over and said: ‘We’re up, kill this game off, just do whatever you can.'”
Lomas, City’s skipper, and Rosler sought to stay in the corner wasting all the seconds and minutes they could, to the bemusement of many inside Maine Road. Including the Liverpool defenders, who seemed perfectly content for the clock to run down.
Quinn, though by this time was already showered and getting treatment for a knock that forced his substitution. In the physio room, he knew from the BBC that City had been fed fake news.
Quinn, in chinos and shirt, raced to the sideline to shatter his team-mates’ illusion of safety. All the while, Ball, under his flat cap, looked utterly bemused by the horror unfolding.
Man City fans seem confused after the draw with Liverpool.
By the time City grasped reality, it was too late. The remaining minutes were too few to build up one last head of steam and the final whistle was greeted by silence from most of the 31,000 present, most still baffled by what they had witnessed.
City were consigned to the second tier – and soon, the third – while one individual sheepishly retreated to the Maine Road exit en route to Argos for a new wireless.
By Ian Watson
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