Rachel Rose

Why Blue?

I have been a subscriber to MCIVTA for about 8 years now, since I landed in New Zealand. I have been meaning to do a Why Blue for all that time, but never got a round to it. How sad is that?!

Basically my dad determined my fate by deciding to support City as a young kid during the war, when both City and United were playing at Maine Road and he lived just a couple of streets away. I asked him why he chose City and he said it was because they were the better team at the time.

My loyalty was cemented at about the age of 8 when I scored the Panini Football sticker of Peter Barnes and developed an instant crush! I didn’t start going to games ironically until I left home at 18 and went to live in Birmingham. I think I needed to maintain my Mancunian connections in a land of Brummy accents, crap beer and psychopathic football fans (I lived in Birmingham City territory). I came back to Manchester 5 years later and lived in Newlyn St, about 2 minutes’ walk from Maine Road, and became a regular at home games. It was at this time that I spotted Peter Swales and some of his cronies outside my office window looking dodgy and no doubt plotting how to squander more of the club’s funds – it was a very frustrating time: the highs of 5-1 against United vs. the lows of the revolving management door and the inability to string more than a couple of wins together at any one time.

Last time I was back in the UK during the football season in 2000, I took my Kiwi husband (a Chelsea fan who has been pretty unbearable this year – the effect of telling him we were the only team to beat them all season wore thin after a while!) to Maine Road, where we played with our then customary lack of enthusiasm against very average sides, in this case Leicester City. Mark spotted the yawning gap in our defence that allowed Savage to score from a free kick, that being the only goal of the game, sigh. Mark asked how such a crap team (his words, not mine of course) could attract so much support, and I didn’t really have an answer, except to say that I couldn’t think of following any other team and that we must be a bunch of eternal optimists…

…which brings me to my motivation for finally getting around to completing the Why Blue. For the first time since I have been reading MCIVTA I am getting a feeling of genuine excitement and anticipation for next season from those of you who get to see the team on a regular basis. This is what we have been waiting for, for the last 30 years! Who would have thought that we would go from singing “You lost the World Cup, Stuart Pearce” to singing his praises as our most promising manager in recent years?

All the best to the team for next season, by which time I’ll be a mum of twins and will need to start the indoctrination process for the new generation.

First printed in: MCIVTA Newsletter #1126 on