Tims 92

Manchester City

The City of Manchester Stadium

Ground No. 37 (return visit)

Visited - Saturday 15^th January 2011

Result - Manchester City 4-3 Wolverhampton Wanderers

Competition - Barclays Premier League

Attendance - 46,672

If 2012 is to be remembered for the London Olympics, then 2011 will surely be remembered for the wrangling over the Olympic Stadium’s future. The whole idea of legacy and retaining it as a base for athletics, whilst understandable from an athletics point of view was financially unviable and needed a tenant to pay for it, with the only realistic option being a football club, no other sports really generating the sort of revenue to make it viable in the way that it needed to be. The problem of course though is that no football club wants to play in an athletics stadium, the stands separated from the pitch by a wide track. Of the two bidders, Spurs had suggested the most practical option, of rebuilding this site into a rectangular ground and instead ploughing money into the existing athletics facilities at Crystal Palace and regenerating them, but of course that was too sensible, and not acceptable to an organisation that needs other sports to come in and pay for its showpiece facility. West Ham it was then who agreed to keep the track in place and move into a type of stadium that clubs throughout Europe, (where such a facility has been traditional) are moving away from in droves, in favour of what the Italians outrightly call ‘British style stadiums’. It could have all been so different though if planned for in advance. All the designers had to do was look 200 miles northwards and seen how Manchester had found a solution to the same problem following the 2002 Commonwealth Games.

Manchester City had played at Maine Road since moving there from Hyde Road in 1923. Despite having clocked up many an attendance record, come the end of the millennium parts of it had grown old and in need of replacement, and whilst despite being a massive site, the developments that had taken place had been poorly planned, leaving City with a capacity well short of what they realistically needed. It was a situation not dissimilar to what both West Ham and Spurs find themselves with now, but the answer was obvious, and in this case planned for at the design stage. Athletics in this country simply doesn’t need large scale arenas, and as above, football clubs don’t want to play in stadiums with an athletics track, so when the stadium was being built for the Commonwealth Games, a smaller warm up track was built next door, and the main stadium built so following the games’ completion, the track could be removed, the pitch lowered and a new bowl of seating built where the track had been. It was perfect, and suited all parties, the football club getting a stadium in the configuration they wanted, athletics gaining a suitably sized stadium and the legacy of the games retained on the same site.

Unfortunately I’d never had the chance to visit Maine Road, except whilst it was halfway towards becoming a pile of rubble, but I had been to the City of Manchester Stadium twice, firstly for a Wolves game that had ended 3-3 and secondly for a game billed as the battle between the two future England manager contenders in Stuart Pearce and Alan Curbishley! Neither are even managing a club now, and with it being five years since that game, then I decided it was time to go back and revisit the ground, Wolves’ game with City promising to be a hard fought affair following the 2-1 win at Molineux earlier in the season for Mick McCarthy’s side.

Formed in 1880, the move to the new stadium was a return to their east Manchester roots for city, having been founded as St Marks (West Gorton), and later named Ardwick FC in 1887 following the move to Hyde Road, the site of which stands barely half a mile from CoMS. The club were a member of the Football Alliance (an early rival to the Football League), and they became founder members of the Second Division when it formed in 1892, winning it in 1899 before gaining their first major honours in 1904 when they defeated Bolton in the FA Cup Final, only just missing out on the double after finishing runners-up in the league to Sheffield Wednesday. The only other time that the FA Cup had come to Manchester had been in 1893 when Wolves defeated Everton at Fallowfield, but trouble lay ahead though, and the suggestion that they overpay their players these days isn’t a new allegation, the only difference to back then is that in 1905 it was illegal, with a wage cap of £4 a week! City were found guilty after Billy Meredith, upset at not being financially supported by the club during his suspension for corruption (he’d offered opposition players bribes for throwing matches), had run to the FA and blown the whistle. It resulted in their manager being banned from the game for life, seventeen players suspended from playing for over a year, the club fined and forced to sell their players through an auction. In the aftermath, Meredith switched allegiances to Manchester United, yet after returning to City fifteen years later, he still seems to enjoy a favourable reputation, having been inducted into their hall of fame in 2004.

The club went on to win the league for the first time in 1937, having won the FA Cup for the second time three years earlier, yet it is probably the late 60s/early 70s that was their real glory period, under management duo of Joe Mercer and Malcolm Allison. Gaining promotion from the Second Division in their first season, they added their second league title to the trophy cabinet in 1968, with the FA Cup following in 1969, and the Cup Winners Cup and League Cup 12 months later. A ding dong battle with Wolves in 1974 saw them narrowly fail to gain their second League Cup success, John Richards’ goal giving the Molineux men the trophy in a 2-1 win, but City did win it for the second time two years later when they beat Newcastle in the 1976 final. Despite the trophies though, many fans might suggest that their biggest success during this time was relegating rivals Manchester United in ’74, Dennis Law famously back heeling a late goal to send them down to the Second Division! Success since then has been hard to come by, although things at least seem to be looking up nowadays, with Arab owners throwing cash at the club as if they’re printing it, Sheik Mansour having spent over one billion pounds since he took over in 2008.

Still, money is no guarantee of success, and with the 2-1 win from October fresh in the memory, then we set off mid-morning for Manchester in a fairly good mood, arriving with no problems, the journey these days taking not much more time from Wolverhampton than that to Coventry.

The ground is only a short walk from the city centre, so after having spent some time there and having a drink and some food, then we set off to arrive fairly early. From the outside, it’s a ground that to be fair I’ve never massively liked, the grey exterior crying out to be repainted in the clubs colours. To be fair, they have at least covered a few of the spiral staircases that lead up to the upper tiers in blue hoardings, but it doesn’t make a massive difference, with the dull miserable weather not helping show it in the best of lights either. There have though been two notable changes since my last visit, at either end of the stadium, where at the South end, the B of the Bang Statue had been taken down, written off as structurally unsafe, which was a shame, as it was always good to look out of the window of the train coming into Piccadilly and seeing it in the distance, a distinctive shape on the city’s skyline, whilst at the North end, a new plaza has been built with bars and a video screen, not dissimilar to Ajax in an attempt to attract more fans to the ground earlier before the game. With the mornings rain returning though, I headed quickly into the ground, and up to the seats, which unlike last time (and part of the reason for wanting to revisit), were in the upper tier.

The away end is behind the goal, offering fantastic views spread over two tiers, and facilities you’d expect from a stadium of this age. The whole ground has two continuous tiers in a bowl shape, with the upper slightly overhanging the lower at the rear. A row of executive boxes sits above the second tier on all four sides (but not joined up in the corners), and in addition, both sides of the ground have third tiers that slope upwards, giving the roof a saddleback look to it, curving upwards towards the halfway line before flat again at each end. All in all, an impressive sight, and the fifth largest in the Premier League with a 47,726 capacity that the club are looking to increase at some point in the future, should the plans for world domination go through!

Since the previous meeting in October both sides had, perhaps predictably, suffered differing fates, City cementing their position in the top four, Wolves cementing it in the bottom four! Even having beaten Chelsea in the previous league outing, then it’s fair to say that the travelling 3000 weren’t overly hopeful of repeating the success from then, but in the 12^th minute we took the lead, Nenad Milijas getting a foot on the ball in a penalty area scramble to make it 1-0, and shortly after it should have been 2-0, Jarvis having all the time in the world to pick his spot before firing straight at Kolarov on the line. If the home defence were on the rocks, then the City forward line was at least making up for them, peppering the Wolves goal with shots that Wayne Hennessey was able to turn away, until just before half time their pressure paid off, Kolo Toure getting the ball from a deep corner before blasting it through a group of players who couldn’t keep it out of the net on a wet surface, the ball slipping through them.

After half-time, a 15 minute spell from the home side killed the game, Carlos Tevez showing what he could do when he weaved the ball through the Wolves defence to score a goal reminiscent of Maradona’s in the ’86 World Cup quarter final versus England (the good one, not the fat junkie cheat one), before Yaya Toure slotted home a neat passing move, and Tevez got his second, heading in at the near post to make it game over on 66 minutes, but if city have one thing then it’s a self destruct button. Two minutes later and Joleon Lescott gave away a stupid penalty on the edge of the box when he clumsily barged over Kevin Doyle who was going nowhere, Doyle making no mistake from the spot. It looked like little more than a consolation, but when Ronald Zubar headed home from a corner in the 86^th minute the home fans ended up going nervously quiet, as Wolves started to press in the late stages. Mujangi Bia coming close, his shot looking goalbound, before taking a deflection for a corner, but despite five minutes of injury time, it wasn’t to be, and the brilliance of City’s attack won out over the frailty of their defence to send them top of the table over United.

After leaving, I was in a bit of a mood, not so much annoyed that it had ended up so close, but more that we had let it get away so quickly after half time, but when you’re up against a team that started with £110m worth of players on the bench alone, then what exactly can you expect…

Overall, it had been good to visit the ground again. Whilst the upper tier offers some fantastic views, you do get a slight feeling of being detached from the action, with most of the atmosphere seeming to come from the tier below, so should I go back, or anyone is looking for recommendations of where to sit, then I’d suggest the lower tier might be the better alternative.