Reviews of Blue Moon on Manchester City Info Via The Alps website, October 1999
Mark Hodkinson is the journalist who spent a year following Manchester City, producing a weekly column for The Times newspaper on life at Maine Road. His book 'Blue Moon - Down Among the Dead Men with Manchester City' centres round the articles he produced during that dramatic season. They're presented in chronological order, though it's the full versions rather than the edited texts printed in The Times which appear. These are supplemented by an additional 30,000 words. A brief day-by-day summary of relevant news items is fitted around the longer pieces to put them in context, while in many cases the author chooses to re-examine with the benefit of hindsight the subjects he addressed earlier.
Hodkinson was asked to cover City after undertaking a similar task the previous year at Barnsley during the Yorkshire club's one season in the Premiership. The angle then had been the fight of a relative minnow against the top flight's giants. In the wake of our relegation, we were an obvious contrast, with a support and turnover which dwarfed those of every other club we'd be facing.
As I was working abroad until recently, I was unaware of Hodkinson's assignment until partway through the season. Had I been told of it before he began, I'd have been instantly mistrustful. After all, in the preceding years the club had managed to consolidate its undisputed niche as English football's biggest laughing stock and it would therefore have been all to easy for any author to resort lazily to cheap jibes. Hodkinson himself admits that it was "magnanimous" of City to allow him the access they did, but the club's trust wasn't betrayed. He's never an apologist for the club, but nor does he ever seek to use City as an easy target for deprecating humour. He's fair and the notes on the back cover can justifiably claim he's "impartial". This doesn't necessarily mean that I agree with every opinion he expresses on every topic. It does mean there's no hidden agenda and his views in any case are sufficiently considered for the odd divergence of his outlook from mine not to grate.
This balanced approach contributes to making the book the most genuinely revealing I've read in a long time about Manchester City and the people there who count. Hodkinson has gathered thoughtful pieces centred round interviews with board members (David Bernstein and Dennis Tueart), the management team (Joe Royle and Willie Donachie), Academy Director Jim Cassell and team captain Andy Morrison. Chris Bird, who rose meteorically from the club's PR consultant to the boardroom in less than a year, wasn't profiled in an article, but was the club representative with whom the author dealt on the most regular basis during the year. Hodkinson is thus able to offer a retrospective comment of some authority on Bird's accession to a position of real power and on the qualities which took him there.
While it's these pieces which hold most interest for me personally as a City fan concerned about how my club is run, the book's entertainment value and its appeal to those whose priorities differ from mine are enhanced considerably by the variety of the other articles. Many of those focus on characters from the City community who are not currently playing a high-profile rôle within the club itself. Hodkinson covers a range of personalities in this category - such as former players (Colin Bell and Paul Lake), an ex-manager (John Bond), former directors (Sidney Rose and Chris Muir), an eclectic bunch of celebrity fans ranging from Bernard Manning to Mark and Lard, the Maine Road laundry women and the editor of the City 'til I Cry fanzine Tom Ritchie. Then there are pieces where the author reflects on the latest events at the club, like how the Christmas visit of Stoke might prove a turning point, how the on-field events of Millwall's trip north perhaps indicated that Lady Luck was beginning to smile on City and of course a certain fateful May Sunday. Finally, there's a twenty-page chapter recording City fans' Wembley memories expressed in their own words, almost all taken from MCIVTA.
This breadth of scope notwithstanding, the author has apparently said he regrets not interviewing Bert Trautmann and Francis Lee. I have one or two other aspects of life at Maine Road into which I might have liked an insight, such as the routine of one of the young hopefuls at the Academy or an overview of the work of the club's commercial and marketing operations. However, it's impossible to deny that the author conveys the variety among the adherents of the broad church which is Manchester City FC, so again the criticism is minor.
Furthermore, to emphasise this small gripe would be to ignore the quality of what actually is present. For instance, the depth of many of the interviews is remarkable. Hodkinson evidently has the knack of gaining his subject's trust (he's invited to Joe Royle's house at the end of the season, for instance) and the result is invariably far removed from the habitual, anodyne fare of many football interviews. Andy Morrison is brutally honest when talking about his temperament and the problems it's caused him while Willie Donachie talks openly about his tough upbringing in Glasgow in the fifties and sixties. Paul Lake explains more fully than in any interview I've seen before how the club's flawed approach to treating his knee injury led to his retirement, while Tom Ritchie talks about how his City obsession cost him a marriage and his health.
An equally telling strength is the quality of the writing. Always eminently readable, Hodkinson's best pieces are delightful, none more so than the reflection on the play-off final which appeared in the next day's Times. This piece was posted, uncredited, on the Internet a day or two later and was immediately embraced by the new site for Irish City fans who, unaware of its origins, enthused that, "You won't get much better writing than that," before offering congratulations to the author for having "really epitomised the whole atmosphere and emotions of the day."
While these qualities derive from the author's abilities, the third major strength of the book (at least from a City fan's perspective) is a function of the subject matter. Now that City have escaped from the clutches of Division Two, there's a certain enjoyment (born mainly of relief) in looking back at how things were. A couple of weeks ago, I spent a Friday night travelling with a Wrexham-supporting friend to see his team at Colchester. My sole motive was to remember where we were such a short time ago and revel in one thought: "Thank God City aren't here any more." Hodkinson's account of last season provokes exactly the same pleasurable reaction, a feeling which I'd expect to increase rather than decrease if the club makes the further progress we all hope. Additionally, Hodkinson benefits from something almost unparalled in the Manchester City literary canon - a happy ending, which fortuitously also happened to encompass the most dramatic afternoon most of us can remember as City fans.
I'm confident enough in the author's writing ability and subject selection to feel that his work will be appreciated by non-City fans - after all, my own intention to read 'Life at the Top', his book on Barnsley, is evidence that I don't see partisanship as a pre-requisite for enjoying his material. However, this review is from the perspective of the avid Manchester City supporter. 'Blue Moon' offers an entertaining account of an emotional rollercoaster of a season which will live long in the memory. It offers revealing portraits of major personalities both inside and associated with the club. It's incisive and exceptionally well-written. For these reasons, I don't hesitate to recommend it as a book the committed City fan should own.
Peter Brophy (brophy_peter@hotmail.com)
A well-told tale of woe and hope. That's what you get in Mark Hodkinson's account of City's 1998-99 season in the (old) Third Division. Hodkinson is a City supporter/Times reporter who had previously spent a season with Barnsley in the Premiership, describing the life of a small club thrust into the big-time; his book on City is that story in reverse. It's a good read.
Hodkinson became a familiar figure behind the scenes and on match-days at Maine Road. He was an attentive listener, his judgements shrewd and persuasive. Although the short match reports are a bit flat, by far his best pieces (making up the greater part of the book) are the portraits of people involved with the club. There is the wonderful Stuart Hall, broadcaster extraordinaire. We hear of Andy Morison's love for the peace and solitude of remote Scottish beaches alongside his rawer, tougher side. There's a sympathetic and intelligent interview with the departed Nigel Clough, and while nobody would have him back, Hodkinson does suggest that Clough was unfairly demonised in his time with City. There's the gentlemanly Colin Bell, the unlucky Paul Lake and Kakhaber Tskhadadze. And there's the "uncle" of the club, Roy Clarke of the 1956 Cup-winning side; now 73 and a bit frail, he lives in modest circumstances, chasing memories as vainly as full-backs once chased him. The author isn't old enough to have known that era, but one suspects that part of him hankers after a time when Manchester people chose between the blue and the red but still went occasionally to watch the other lot if their own team was playing away, a time when City fans didn't define themselves, as some do now, by their hatred of United.
Some of the City officials who spoke with Hodkinson did so with a degree of reticence. Even allowing them a natural distrust of journalists it's hard to understand why a senior boardroom figure felt it necessary to sit in on the author's interview with Joyce and Janet, the women who wash the players' kit (unless it was because they know such things as which foreign player once walked into the laundry-room, undid his belt, and announced "Now ladies, I am here to do a favour for you"). More truly revealing of official attitudes is Joe Royle's reported dismissal of the kind of fans who vent their opinions in fanzines or phone-ins; in his view they are a sniping and self-promoting set, untypical of the "silent majority" of supporters. But how does Hodkinson himself regard the fans? It's true that he recognizes that City has its share of morons and boo-boys, and that players have felt intimidated by the jeers from the crowd. It's true, too, that when he began this project the journalist in him wanted to challenge the stereotype of "loyal fans of a club given to magnificent failure". But he is ultimately more generous. "A football club should be supported for the joy it brings, not the misery" he says, and the most joyous part of his book is when, putting aside the cussedness of some, he lets fans speak for themselves by quoting from their postings on the MCIVTA noticeboard after the play-off victory at Wembley. Choose your own favourites from the 70-odd reprinted, but Pat Poynton's and Mark Bell's go a long way to recapturing the emotions of that day.
"A new Manchester City was born at Wembley" wrote Pat Poynton, and if it was, perhaps the astonishing emotional nature of that comeback from the dead has something to do with it. Or is it more to do, as Hodkinson argues, with the sense and stability brought in by the new leadership of Royle, Donachie, Bernstein & Co.? The new prudence is exemplified in Willie Donachie's measured reaction to being telephoned by Rodney Marsh with news of a "hot young prospect" in Paraguay (where else?!). Not so long ago the lad would have been flying in to Ringway Airport, sombrero and all; Donachie, says Hodkinson, just smiled and said "We'll see."
City will likely always attract the hare-brained along with the doubters and pessimists, but there may be fewer opportunities for either follies or laments in the new age dawning. When supporters sing "Blue Moon" it can seem, as Hodkinson writes, "a song for the bruised, the last swig of hope for the sentimental." But it should also be remembered that its last verses, like this very good book, celebrate a happy ending.
Ken Corfield