Dave Lees

Why Blue?

I should have been an Everton fan. My Dad was born on the Scotland Road within rattle chucking distance of Goodison and when I was about five my grandad took me to my first game. It was an evening match sometime around Christmas (I remember because I saw my first plastic illuminated reindeer on the way to the ground) and my grandad warmed me up by standing me outside the pub with a packet of crisps (small blue bag of salt) and an entire bottle of ginger beer all to myself.

It seemed like they were in the pub for hours, and once the crisps and pop had run out I started to worry. As I stood there endless crowds of men marched by, and some of them brushed against me on their way into the pub. Gradually, a puddle of small boys, most of them a little older than me, began accumulating on the steps, and we all began to grow cold looking at each other. Then a woman came out of the pub, handed the oldest boy a tray of sausage rolls and told him to hand them round. They were cold too.

At last, my grandad came out of the pub with a group of other men, including my uncle Dave. They all had their heavy winter coats on and they all wore blue and white scarves. We fairly flew up the road, with me half trotting, half swinging between my uncle and grandad. I think my grandad realised how cold I was when he took hold of my hand, and he made them all stop while he bought me a scarf and a booble hat from somewhere. When we got to the ground he told me to keep my hands in my pockets until Everton scored, and then I was to clap them hard and make myself warm.

I’ve no memory of the game at all. I can’t say who Everton played, what the score was, whether they won or lost. By the time we got home (via the pub again) I was dead on my feet and about to spend the rest of the week in bed with a cold for which my grandad was made to take the blame. He never took me to Goodison again, and I wouldn’t go to another match of any kind for several years.

My dad has remained an Everton fan, and still supports them from an armchair in the home counties. Between that first mid-week game and the time when I was able to go to games on my own (14, I think) my dad kept me topped up with Everton propaganda – tales of Dixie Dean, Tommy Lawton et al, and the Club itself obliged by winning the Cup, then the Championship, and by making sure there were plenty of stars for a youngster to admire (I still wish Joe Royle had taken on City as a manager). From time to time we travelled to Liverpool to watch the odd big game, my uncle Greg worked at Anfield and my father still had pals who went to Goodison. During these years my father kept moving jobs, and we ended up living in a series of football deserts: Somerset, Norfolk, South Wales, Bristol, Worcester and then, Manchester.

Before we came to Manchester my experience of football supporting had been restricted to cheering Everton goals on Match of The Day, collecting stickers, and the odd heated argument with a Villa/Spurs/Wolves/Arsenal or, of course, United supporting classmate. If you grow up outside a football metropolis you do what you can. I adopted my dad’s team, and would probably still be turning to Everton’s results first if we’d never been to Manchester. But…

As soon as I got to Manchester I knew exactly what a I wanted to do – go to Old Trafford and worship George Best. I turned up at the Stretford End, having dutifully bought my first Utd scarf outside the ground. By the time I got home that evening, my scarf had been knicked and I was having serious second thoughts about going back to Old Trafford. So, the following week, I went to City instead.

Up until this first visit to Maine Road I had virtually no feelings about City at all. I knew about Bell, Summerbee and Lee, of course, which were positive things, and I knew City weren’t Leeds, Liverpool or Arsenal – I didn’t know much in those days, but I knew which teams not to support. I had my doubts about the strip – pale blue is still, in my opinion, a wishy washy colour for heroes – but 20 minutes into the game I knew I hadn’t made a mistake.

I can’t remember who was playing or the result, but City must have won, and Lee definitely scored. I know this because I do vividly remember Franny holding both arms aloft and sucking in his stomach as he saluted the Kippax. I also remember my mother becoming irritated with me for pulling the sleeves of my sweaters down and holding the cuff in a clenched fist.

In those days, there is simply no argument, Maine Road was a friendlier ground than Old Trafford and the players were just bigger characters and better footballers but I didn’t notice this straight away, and I kept going to Old Trafford for Best and Charlton and, fleetingly, Storey-Moore. I admit it: I tried and tried to be a United supporter, and there were plenty of people willing to help. My dad ran a hotel in the centre of the city in those days, and virtually all of the staff (who, thinking about it, were all from out of town, if not actually from abroad) were United fans. A lot of the older staff would bore me rigid telling me tales of the time they met Matt Busby or Bobby Charlton or (he had yet to return) Denis Law, and one of the hall porters even tried to train me to recite the Sainted names of the Munich victims.

Maybe that was it. My mother’s quite religious, in a superstitious Irish-Catholic kind of way, and when she could she would haul me into a corner and browbeat some holy story into me, and warn against sin in general. Having the Busby Babes taught to me like a rosary felt very similar. It put me off, but at the same time if I found myself doubting United, I would start to feel guilty, and then I would repent – or something.

Anyway, I spent my first football season in Manchester trying to be a United fan, but actually going to Maine Road more often than Old Trafford. I couldn’t have explained it at the time, but I think it was because I knew instinctively that City were the real thing. There was something ersatz about United. Old Trafford was bigger, the crowd were noisier and stars like Best and Charlton were undoubtedly bigger stars than Lee or Bell, but somehow… I needed something to help me make my mind up, and at the beginning of the following season two things happened which brought things to a head. I was finally enrolled at a local grammar school, and my father started to go to games with me.

At school in Manchester you don’t support Everton. Thankfully, by this time, I’d almost completely forgotten about the toffees, so I had no problems on that score. But, inevitably, I was faced with a choice: I could be cool, or I could be hard. United were the hard choice. I played it cool, and I got a kicking from the cock of the fourth year for my pains. That kicking – theatrical black eye, torn jacket, swollen lip and bruised ribs – wasn’t really talked about at home, but afterwards my dad bought season tickets at both grounds and we went and sat together in the stands for the rest of the season.

I think my dad was actually quite relieved when I turned out not to be much of a tough guy. He’d been a rugby league pro for while after the war, and in his early days in the hotel trade he’d done some of his own bouncing. However, he was always cool as ice in a confontation. I took after my mother, all Irish temper but, in those days, no muscle to speak of. So my Dad obviously decided that I needed looking after, from myself as much as anyone else, and that’s what he did.

I am not one of those supporters who mourns the end of Kops and ends. I enjoyed sitting in the stands, and I enjoyed having the best of both worlds. And from these elevated positions I was able to watch the football and the ritual and everything else that went on, and the longer I watched the more I knew it would be City for me.

It wasn’t just because they were better than United in those days – it was how they were as much as what they were. City had style, wit, humour – they had class. United? Well, as the all the knots came undone it wasn’t pretty. The whining, the peevish jeers, the fighting and the ridiculous last charge onto the pitch after Law’s back-heel (yes – I was there). What a circus! My Dad turned to me then and said “we won’t bother coming here anymore”, and we didn’t.

Could it have been different? If City has gone down, would I have given up our seats behind the goal in the Maine Road north stand? I don’t think so. That season, shuttling between Maine Road and Old Trafford, I’d always been more comfortable in Maine Road. In fact, as I got comfortable at Maine Road so too I think, did I become comfortable in Manchester to the point where now, despite having spent barely three years of my life in the City, I still think of myself as a Mancunian and, of course, a City fan.

It’s nearly 20 years since a I went to a City home game, almost exactly 20 years since I saw Rodney Marsh score the most magical goal it is still my privilege to have ever seen, and it is more than 20 years since I was beaten up for the first and only time in my life (I hope). I still don’t trust United supporters, I still think Rodney Marsh is an international symbol of genius, and I still think Maine Road is home to the best football club in the world. And I always will.

Why Blue?

It’s a less expensive form of masochism than a 20 minute session with Madame Lolita and her whips. And much more painful.

First printed in: MCIVTA Newsletter #248 on