MANCHESTER UNITED - 74/75: THE PLAYERS' STORIES

by Wayne Barton, Tommy Docherty

Within living memory, Manchester United have won every major honour available - yet for many supporters of a certain vintage their favourite season of all was spent not battling for top honours but in the second flight of English football. Following a spectacular decline following the break-up of the 1968 European Cup winners, United were relegated in April 1974 and the following season was supposed to be a humiliation for the club. Instead, the reds responded by re-inventing themselves for a new era and attracting a whole new generation of supporters.
As Wayne Barton discovers, the modern day Manchester United was born during their sojourn in the second tier. From training pitch to boardroom and under the guidance of wise-cracking manager Tommy Docherty, the club moved on from a state of post-war stasis and shaped itself for the next quarter century. Without the pressure to maintain a place in the top flight, The Doc helped reinvigorate a club still struggling to come to terms with the modern era.
With contributions from manager Tommy Docherty, captain Martin Buchan and first team regulars Brian Greenhoff, Sammy McIlroy, Lou Macari and Arnie Sidebottom - the author discovers that relegation to the Second Division was not quite the financial or footballing nightmare it could have been. Alongside United in the second tier that season were future European champions Nottingham Forest and Aston Villa. Meanwhile United finished well ahead of all of them, playing in a refreshing style before record crowds - by April 1975 'The Doc' had revived an ailing patient and set it's pulse racing again and attracted a whole new generation of supporters along the way.

Genres: History

258 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 5, 2015

Reviews

[Derek Collett · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those 'does what it says on the tin' books. It does indeed tell the story of the season that the mighty Man Utd spent in Div 2 although the subtitle 'The Players' Stories' is a little bit disingenuous as the reminiscences of a handful of key names (Buchan, McIlroy, Macari, et al.) are only presented sporadically and can hardly be said to be integral to the tale being told. That said, Tommy Doc does contribute a thoughtful and interesting introduction.

The book is not very well written and is desperately in need of a radical edit and a thorough proofread. It is at least twice as long as it needed to be, too much extraneous and irrelevant information is presented ('Football Mastermind' quizzes from the United programme anyone?), typos abound (two or three on some pages alone and at least one on almost every page!) and the grammar is tortuous in many places. Had the book been pared back to half its final length then that would have allowed room for some (or all) of the following features to have been included: in-depth player profiles of the 74/75 United squad; full-length newspaper match reports; a 'what happened next' section explaining what became of these players in later life; an expanded statistics section; and, most importantly, league tables from key points in the season (none are included in the book, not even the final league table, even though United were top or joint top for the whole of the campaign!).

The opportunity has therefore been missed to present this engaging story in a readable, authoritative and comprehensive fashion. The book is still well worth reading for nostalgia value and for a handful of revealing insights into a key season in United's history but it could have been so much better.