Middle row (l-r); Mick McGuire, Brian Alderson, Bill Rafferty, Wilf Smith, Mick Coop, Willie Carr, Quintin Young
Front row (l-r); Bobby Parker, Dennis Mortimer, Gordon Milne (Team Manager), Joe Mercer (General Manager), Tommy Casey (Coach), Bert Edwards (Trainer-Coach), Roy Barry
By Jim Brown
The search for a new manager ended on 15 June 1972 with the announcement that Gordon Milne, non-league Wigan Athletic’s 35-year old player-manager, and Joe Mercer, Manchester City’s highly respected 57-year old supremo were to be jointly appointed. There would be no early splash into the transfer market, as the duo needed to take stock of the players available. But when the first six games came and went without a win, the stocktaking process had to be accelerated. After eleven games, by which time the Sky Blues had clocked up their first two wins the dealing started in earnest. Centre half and captain Jeff Blockley was sold to Arsenal for a club record fee of £200,000. The cash generated enabled the club to pull off two master strokes that would kick-start the season into life. Tommy Hutchison and Colin Stein, players of proven pedigree, were signed from Blackpool and Glasgow Rangers respectively.
The arrival of the two Scots sparked an irresistible period in the club’s First Division history. The team suffered only five defeats in 24 league and cup games from October to mid-March. Although there were too many draws to make a major impact on the top six any relegation thoughts were banished and the season also offered many individual highlights – Hutchison’s goal at Highbury, for example, some sparkling home performances, and the club’s best FA Cup run for a decade. Youngsters Carr, Mortimer and Alderson all flourished under the new attacking style of play.
On his debut Hutchison sparked a scintillating 3-2 victory over Manchester City and some of Hutch’s early performances were the stuff of legend. Hutchison’s tussles with the likes of Billy Bonds and Mick Mills would sow the seeds for man-to-man confrontation that would last throughout the 1970s.
The fast flowing, attacking football brought the fans flooding back to the ground and in January the visit of a relegation-threatened Manchester United as usual attracted the season’s biggest crowd of 42,911, the largest at the ground for three years. Managed by Tommy Docherty this was an ugly United that besmirched the tradition of stylish football the fans had come to expect from the Reds. An estimated 5,000 United fans were in Coventry for the game and there was trouble all day in the city. There were 32 arrests, half of them under 17-years of age, shop and house windows were smashed around the city and the ground. After the game United’s fans held a running battle with police right through the Precinct and back to the railway station. Chief Superintendent John Ridley, head of Coventry police said: ‘While professional football is attracting this type of hooligan fan in the numbers it is, no police force can do much about it.’ He estimated that three-quarters of the arrests were Manchester United supporters, although none were from Manchester.
A week later 38,000 were there to see City progress to the Fifth Round of the FA Cup with a 1-0 win over Grimsby. One of the largest away followings ever at the ground, estimated to be 10,000, watched the Mariners hold out under intense City pressure for 86 minutes before conceding a controversial penalty which Mick Coop coolly slotted home at the Kop end in front of the baying Grimsby hordes.
Hull City were thrashed in Round Five in revenge for the previous year’s upset with two trademark Stein goals – on hearing that Colin had joined Coventry one Scottish journalist said: ‘he will run through brick walls for you’, and Coventry fans loved the Scot for this style. For probably the first time in the club’s history the fans thought they had a realistic chance of getting to Wembley and many pundits tipped City to go all the way. 15,000 City fans descended on Molineux but they were to be disappointed. City never really got going, giving one of their poorest displays for some months to exit the competition in deflated circumstances.
The aftermath was anti-climactic, and anyone surveying the season as a whole would have deduced that it was a poor season. It had not, however, been short on entertainment, and had given the fans something to cheer after years of dull defensive soccer. That said, the seven consecutive defeats to round off the season was unprecedented in the club’s history.
The early season attendances had continued to slide but in September the fans were shocked when the crowd for the Stoke City home game was announced as 14,317 – 2,000 below their previous First Division low. The resurgence in form however boosted gates and at the end of the season the average was 24,623, an increase of 902 (3.8%) on the previous campaign – the first time the decline in gates had been arrested in five years.
In the Texaco Cup City again flattered to deceive, going out at the first hurdle to Motherwell on a 3-4 aggregate.
The end of an era came in April when chairman Derrick Robins resigned abruptly for ‘health reasons’ after 13 years in the chair. His only son 30-year old Peter, who had been a board member for six years, took the chair with former player Iain Jamieson, 44, a director of Courtaulds, joining the board.
