LOVE IN THE TIMES OF CORONA (MANCHESTER UNITED NEVER RUINED MY LIFE)

As Britain’s “nonchalant” Prime Minister considers his next move on the behalf of an expectant and grateful population from the comfort of his duck feather duvet and the next in line to the throne weighs the irony of being laid low by a virus that translates as “crown”, the rest of us chew obsessively on anything to hand and try not to start talking to ourselves in a Daniel Hannan voice.

Not since the days of Frank Clark have we been so utterly at a loss for words, thoughts and appropriate actions.

And even Frank had a guitar to calm the fits of nervousness that surely flowed over him during an untidy tenure in charge of Manchester City.

I don’t play musical instruments, so instead stand in front of my bookcase humming. My eyes were wandering along the line of books yesterday when they alighted on Colin Schindler’s “Manchester United Ruined My Life”. I can remember when this came out, it became quite popular. This was long before the author became celebrated for his disowning of City because they were no longer bad enough for him to feel comfortable associating with anymore. It was a peculiar stance even then and, with time, has grown to look like obtuseness just for the sake of it, a kind of Mark Ogdenism from within.

Schindler’s publishers, Headline Books, had even persuaded the fragrant Maureen Lipman to offer a quote for the back cover: “Manchester United Ruined My Life purports to be an autobiography about a sports obsessive,” it gurgles. “In fact, it is a bleak but often hilarious book about the unfunny subject of loss.” Maureen later got a job on Match of the Day alongside Garth Crooks.

The cover to the first print was an odd affair too, depicting a child being thrown high (very high) in the air from a pair of male arms. Presumably this was in some subliminal way designed to depict the mighty fall the kid was about to experience. It’s a kind of metaphor, I decided, from pre-Health and Safety days. The dust cover suggests the author had been “dealt a cruel blow of fate” (well, we’ve all been there) when “at the age of three” he became “a passionate Manchester City supporter”.

At this point, if I had had any sense, I would have put the book back and aborted the purchase. Perhaps got the box set of Thomas the Tank Engine and a pencil case instead. At the age of three I was passionate about only two things: pulling the tale off our cat and rolling tins of soup down the drive.

Being “a City supporter in a sea of red” had obviously had a special effect on our Colin. Maybe he was just ahead of his time and Maureen Lipman was right after all. Bleak, it certainly was and the subject of loss is confirmedly what you might want to call unfunny, although, after a while, I seem to remember the only decent way of combatting what had become something of a monotonous repetition of “bad stuff” when following City was to embrace it wholeheartedly with any degree of humour one could muster. Laughing at Jason van Blerk quickly became a way of life in my flat.

I am not as old as Colin. Manchester United had a decent go at ruining my life too, but I defeated their attempts. We all did. We did it together. It took an eternity, but that’s what makes these things so sweet in the end.

Around 1996, it looked odds on we would lose the battle, however. When notorious Pixie with Whistle, Alan Wilkie, gifted the all-powerful United a penalty against a visibly struggling City in the FA Cup at Old Trafford, it seemed the fight was up. 18^th February 1995, Fifth round of the Cup. In those days reaching the 5^th round produced a feeling amongst the faithful akin to the sensation the presenters of Good Morning get when there’s a royal wedding around the corner. City had taken the lead through an impish assist from Kinkladze and a delightful chip from Uwe Rosler. Schmeichel’s flailing arms with a backdrop of 10,000 flying City fans was a favourite image in my mind for at least twenty minutes, before Wilkie needlessly took matters into his own hands.

Between the 11^th minute (unexpected joy) and the 33^rd minute (Wilkie’s Triumph), that image nestles in my brain and propagates. It is the polar-opposite of coronavirus, infusing my thoughts with a honey-sweet warmth. Then I am jolted back to life, as the game has stopped in City’s penalty area. There had been a corner. I presume in the flurry of activity, one of United’s robust fellows has committed a foul, but John Motson’s thin voice is saying “Do you know, I think he’s giving a penalty…”.

A photograph appeared in the broadsheets the following day of Wilkie, erect yet somehow diminished, frazzled, shrunken, being “approached for clarity” by at least eight of City’s team. Steve Lomas is shouting so hard, his prodigious ears look to be working loose, Niall Quinn seems close to tears, but it is the expression being worn by little Kinkladze that has stuck with me all these years, because it mirrored my own thoughts at the time. Kinkladze, a citizen of Tbilisi who possessed notoriously poor English skills, looks like someone has just quoted a long and distressing passage of Keats at him, so deep is his expression of abject non-comprehension. To say that Wilkie, a short man from Middlesbrough with no hair, was trying to make up for something might carry credence even today.

That bejeweled 95-96 season was the clear downturn moment for the club towards the deep and malodourous trough that they would inhabit for most of the following five years. With Alan Ball in charge and a permanently surprised looking ex-United goalkeeper Alex Stepney looking after the squad’s goalkeepers, things felt a little off-centre even before the rot set in.

Ball’s managerial style was strictly feet-on-desk, hide-behind-the Racing-Post. His sartorial style of shell suit and flat cap was equally avant-garde. Lavish was his history, though, as City’s unsubstantial squad members would frequently be reminded in team talks that started with the sigh-inducing “I’m a World Cup winner me” speech.

Ball had seen it all before. He had shared a pitch with Eusebio and with Beckenbauer, had helped Nobby Stiles fit his false teeth and shared secret thoughts with Jack Charlton. By the time it came to telling Michael Frontzeck (incredibly, given the quality of his performances at Maine Road, himself a Euro final medal winner with Germany in 1992) how to man mark Eric Cantona, it had all become a bit samey, a bit flat, a bit airless. Like the party balloons still hanging from the light fittings three days after the music stops, managing Buster Philips, Scott Hiley and a beyond-motivation Nigel Clough in a relegation dogfight was all a bit limp. That the dogfight could have been won with a sprightly Pekinese and a sense-deprived corgi (City’s “rivals” for the drop were Southampton, Coventry, Bolton, QPR and Wimbledon) seemed not to matter.

As Colin Schindler might have said, fate had decided that, with a manager who was prepared to go out in public wearing clothes like that, we should all take our punishment. But this was not to be a slap on the back of the hand with a ruler. It was not to be a month without watching Match of the Day (which would have been a sun-kissed blessing that season). No, fate had decreed that City and the phalanx of thousands of die-hard masochists, who still couldn’t find anything better to do with their Saturday afternoons, would descend to the third division, via severe embarrassment at places like Elm Park and the County Ground and on through to the damp and cold terraces of the Racecourse Ground, the scaffolding and gravel of the Memorial Stadium and, of course, the 50,000 capacity away end at Bootham Crescent.

Fate had something quite special up its sleeve for City. We would have quite a time together, before anything noticeably improved, but, when it did, it kind of made up for all of the bad things we had witnessed, even Ball’s mauve shellsuit.

But it was not the same for all of us.

Schindler’s tome begot a short film spin off too, I remember, which raised two or three laughs on top of the original shimmer of noise afforded the book. It would be the last time Colin felt proud to be a City fan, but for the rest of us, it would be the start of a journey out of the dark and into the light. The laughter in those bad times had seen us all through to the other side and it must do so again now.