Blue moon rising

WHERE were you when you were bad?” chanted the Newcastle United fans to their Manchester City counterparts last Sunday, which brought a wry smile to the face of Willie Donachie, now on the backroom staff at St James’ Park. They were with their team, thought the Scot, who suffered alongside them for much of his career. Every step of the way.

If City win the championship in today’s climax to the Barclays Premier League, their first in 44 years, there will be an outpouring of emotion among all of those, including Donachie, who have been to hell and back these last four decades, wondering how it could all have gone so horribly wrong.

If the club he joined as a 16-year-old, just after their last title triumph, can manage to come full circle with a victory against Queens Park Rangers this afternoon, they will have brought their long-running soap opera to an end, and it will not matter how many pounds they have spent, or how many traditionalists they have upset, in the process.

“I don’t care what anybody says, I’ll just be delighted for the fans,” says Donachie. “I’d love to see them do it because they have been through so much. With Man United doing so well, it has been hard for them to handle, but they have been unbelievable all along. My family, my kids have gone through it all, supporting them through thick and thin. These people have been with them for 40 years, through all the bad times, and they deserve a bit of success.”

Donachie spent 12 years there as a full-back, trying and failing to reclaim the title that City were celebrating when he arrived. A youngster when Joe Mercer and Malcolm Allison guided them to a hatful of trophies – including the 1970 European Cup-Winners’ Cup – Donachie assumed that another league crown would be along soon, but it wasn’t. He was in the team that won the 1976 League Cup but, when it came to championships, he had only near misses, by as little as a single point on two occasions.

Donachie, who left Maine Road in 1980, could not believe that the club who had performed so well in the 1970s were so bad in the decade that followed. After relegation in 1983, they spent the next 20 years as a yo-yo club, teased by one false dawn after another while chairmen, as well as managers, contrived to let them down.

The nadir was reached in 1998, when Donachie became assistant manager to Joe Royle but could not prevent City slipping into the old second division, England’s third tier. Mercifully, they had only one season among the Darlingtons and Walsalls of this world but Donachie took it personally. “For me, it was so embarrassing, just shameful really. To think that I was part of them going down…”

This is what they mean when they talk of “typical City”. Self-destruction is in the club’s DNA. They won their first English title in 1937, only to be relegated a year later. In 1972, when Donachie was a first-team regular, they were four points clear in March, only to sign Rodney Marsh, and spectacularly collapse.

No wonder, when Donachie says he is “almost certain” that they will get the job done this afternoon, he lingers on the “almost”. When Newcastle were beaten 2-0 by City last weekend, he cringed at the visiting team’s reaction. “I didn’t like the way they celebrated as if they had won the title already. It was too early to do that. I wouldn’t tempt fate if I was them.”

In some ways, it doesn’t matter. If they don’t win it this year, they will win it 12 months down the line. Donachie suspects that City are entering into a period of dominance. Last weekend, when he looked along the touchline at their substitutes, he mused for a moment on how much they had cost. “It added up to nearly a hundred million,” he says. “I mean they brought on [Nigel] De Jong, who played in the World Cup final, and [Edin] Dzeko, who cost £28 million. [Carlos] Tevez is in and out of the team. They’ve got the best players in the world… about 20 of them.”

City are a different club to that which Donachie last worked for 11 years ago but the fans are the same, and even some of the staff. He says it is “sad” the way football has gone, with titles being bought and clubs losing their identity but it is not going to change, so why complain?

“It started with Blackburn, who won it when Jack Walker ploughed the money in. Then it was Chelsea. Now it is Man City. It will end up with ten or 12 clubs who are mega rich, fighting it out among themselves. One of the good things is that there are a few now, whereas in the past, it has often been a two-horse race. It is becoming more competitive.”

Now 60, the softly-spoken Donachie has no difficulty moving with the times. The lad from Castlemilk, who played for Scotland in the 1978 World Cup finals, has had only brief spells as a manager in his own right – with Millwall and Antigua – but if it happens again, he will take into the job the kind of ideas that would put many a younger coach to shame.

Among those is a desire to take from other sports the psychological techniques that footballers tend to ignore. In an effort to maximise his own mental strength, Donachie meditates for half an hour, morning and night. “It’s vital because it helps me to be more realistic, more objective, see things more clearly and hopefully be a better coach. If you’re too caught up in the experience, you can’t observe what’s happening. If I was shouting and bawling at the side all the time, I’m not seeing what’s actually needed. Sadly, if you are not jumping up and down, or running along the line, they think you’ve no passion. To me, a lot of that is for show. It’s for the fans or the media.”

With an outside chance of securing a Champions League place, Newcastle have their own ambitions today, but Donachie can be excused for keeping an eye on the scorelines elsewhere. While City are at home, United are at Sunderland. With the teams level on points, it could be decided on goal difference.

The likelihood is that City will pip their rivals, just as they did in 1968, although in those days it wasn’t such a big deal. “United won the European Cup that year, with Law, Best and Charlton, but we were used to beating them,” says Donachie, who admits that the current vintage looks set to acquire the same habit.