Behind The Curtain: Manchester City & Eastern Europe

Just 347 kilometres separate Budapest from Zagreb, but in Manchester City terms, the two cities are also split by a more sizeable gap of 50 years. This is a story of Eastern European symmetry, City-style.

In 1970, City’s fledgling European efforts were beginning to take shape. On 4^th November Honved, the army side from Budapest, arrived in Manchester for a second leg tie in the 2^nd round of the much maligned Cup Winners’ Cup. Much maligned it may have been, but the Cup Winners Cup was a tournament that had already featured many British successes, with West Ham, Spurs and Chelsea finding prestige and glamour inside UEFA’s so-called “third tournament”. It also became a tournament renowned for bringing to us what Shoot magazine always termed “crack” Eastern European sides, with such luminaries as Magdeburg, Slovan Bratislava, Dynamo Tbilisi, Dynamo Kiev and Karl Zeiss Jena making their mark in the tournament’s early years. Why they were always “crack” and not “mysterious” or “unpronouncable”, I don’t know, but in those days there was no Twitter to pour ridicule on the inventor of the description, so you just went with it.

On this occasion, Honved were to fall to a smooth, slick City side marshalled by the energetic midfield prompting of Colin Bell and Alan Oakes and given thrust by the persistent forward charging of Mike Summerbee and Francis Lee. In the following round City would face Gornik Zabrze of Poland, taking three games – including an extra play off in Copenhagen – to shake off the well-drilled Silesian team. It was not the first time City had played Gornik, of course, the talented Poles having been stubborn opponents in City’s final win the previous season, 1969-70. A deluge in the Prater Stadium, Vienna, on that illustrious occasion may have soaked the hardy band of City supporters that had made the intrepid journey across Europe, but the triumph put City ahead of the likes of future big guns Liverpool in European pedigree. What was to come for the Merseysiders in the 70s and 80s would put all British clubs in the shade, but at the time of City’s triumph, Liverpool were yet to taste continental success, with only a final defeat to Borussia Dortmund in 1966 to show for their efforts, a run incidentally that also saw them defeat Honved in an early round.

For City the Honved game had served to bring another link between them and Eastern European football to light. Extravagant coach Malcolm Allison had been infatuated with the Hungarian football philosophies of the 50s during his playing days at West Ham and had brought many of the elements he had seen in their training routines, match preparation and in-game tactics to Moss Side. Even before that he had become a pseudo coach at the Boleyn Ground: although still nominally a member of the playing staff, Allison would take manager Ted Fenton’s team sheets down when they were posted every Friday after training and return after a brief tête-à-tête with Fenton to post “new” tweaked line-ups and formations. The players were left in no doubt who was taking the big decisions, a feature of Allison’s presence that would follow him from Plymouth to Middlesbrough and Lisbon to Kuwait as a most charismatic manager. His group of conspiratorial worshippers amongst the Upton park playing staff included future managers Noel Cantwell, John Cartwright, Dave Sexton, John Bond, Ken Brown, Andy Nelson and Jimmy Andrews. His influence, and that of the Hungarians, would be spread far and wide through the English football league and beyond.
(As a player in 1953 Allison, with future Norwich manager Ken Brown alongside him at the back, had been in the West Ham side thrashed 6-0 at home by a startling AC Milan side led by Gunnar Nordahl and Alberto Schiaffino. This experience too had shaped Allison’s thinking)

Allison had been at the Prater long before that rain-soaked Cup Winners Cup final of 1970, when he finally got the chance to show the world what he had learned, training there in his army conscription days as an 18 year-old and bunking off to watch the Austrians train. “Demob date couldn’t come quickly enough,” Allison mused. “I was deeply impressed with the way the Austrians enslaved the ball. They made it do all the work. They were neat and controlled. There was nothing crude or haphazard about their work. I thought to myself, this is what we have to do in England. I was going to try to adapt some of the ideas I had picked up from watching the Austrians.”

The Honved games in 1970 had seen City playing some of their best, most artfully fluent football of an era heavily decorated with their flamboyant winning style. At the end of the tie, a Honved official approached Allison and told him “that was the best football we have ever seen from an English team in our country. You showed skill, strength and aggression.” For Allison these accolades represented a kind of climactic fulfilment of years of tinkering, adapting what he had seen from the Austrians and the Hungarians and the great Milan side of the 50’s and generally addressing the infinite minutiae of coaching. Allison was a deep thinker and maintained a weather-eye on every tiny segment of his players’ professional lives, much like, it must be said, the delicious pedantry of the present well-dressed incumbent at the Etihad.

Inspiration From Puskas & Others

In his revealing 1975 memoir “Colours of my Life”, Allison remarked, ‘I had been introduced to the mystique and the background of that extraordinary Hungarian side that burst across the continent in the 1950s’. After the first leg against Honved in the dusty Budapest suburb of Kispest, Allison was further indulged, escorted by home team officials to the restaurant where Puskas was said to have made a start on building the solid paunch that tricked so many into thinking he was fat and slow and the nearby house with the red chimney, where he had lived before defecting. “They told me how Puskas made that left foot such a deadly weapon, something so easy and natural that he could control a football as another man holds a fountain pen…”. Echoing Guardiola’s never-leave-anything-to-doubt mantra, Allison contended, “In England we are too sloppy. We do things out of habit and without properly enquiring about their value. We lack the deep conditioning, which is inbuilt on the continent and in South America…”

Honved (national champions in 1950, 1952, 1954 and 1955) had delivered the likes of Puskas, Bozsik, Czibor, Kocsis, Grosics, Budai and Lorant to a Hungarian national side, which came to Wembley and startled England out of their self-important slumber. Allison was entranced. Puskas, seen as overweight and immobile, performed a 90-minute masterclass in energy conservation while making England’s midfield look like a group of hastily arranged battery chickens. It was the home nations first ever defeat on home soil by a team from outside the British Isles and it certainly coloured Allison’s life. He would copy the Hungarian’s lightweight boots and shorts cut to the thigh, fascinated by the little bits and pieces that had gone into their match planning.

Easy passing and finding space for others were his meat and drink. The wake-up call was shrill and painful: an unprecedented 6-3 defeat on our own hallowed turf for what the FA and many supporters still considered the untouchable masters of the game. After being mauled and summarily undressed by the strolling Magyars, things would begin to change and Allison was at the front of the queue to enact the transformation needed. In his role as a television pundit, the City coach continued to be vociferous in his criticism of the English game and the dusty old men who ran it. Putting his thoughts into practice at Maine Road, he and Joe Mercer developed a side honed on proper fitness training, good diet and rigorous planning and practice. The results were quick to materialise, with City entering their best-ever phase of trophy-winning, a golden period only surpassed by recent events. Nothing lasts forever, though, and with Allison gone, the cold Siberian winds of stagnation and failure started to blow through the club.