Blue moon over Manchester

One of the earliest and most hard-earned lessons I learned in the playground as a young football neophyte was that there was no team called Manchester.

One of the earliest and most hard-earned lessons I learned in the playground as a young football neophyte was that there was no team called Manchester.

An older, wiser head — I’m guessing he would have been, oh, at least eight or nine — never hesitated to put me straight when, at the outset of my enthusiastic but stumbling apprenticeship, I repeatedly slipped up and betrayed my ignorance.

“Manchester? Manchester?” he’d scoff. “What do I keep telling you? There’s no team called Manchester.”

Eventually, of course, the penny dropped — though I’d be embarrassed to have to confess just how much longer it took to come to what was, for me, the staggering realisation that there wasn’t in fact a team in Scotland rejoicing under the name of Patrick Thistle.

Fortunately, The Jags didn’t command a whole lot of support when I was growing up in Tallaght in the late 60s.

Manchester United did, of course. And it was United, almost always United, to whom my exasperated young mentor was referring when, not remotely sparing my blushes, he sought to advance my football education.

Not that Manchester City didn’t have their own exotic appeal back in the day: There was always something to catch the eye when Mike

Summerbee, Franny Lee and Colin Bell were in their pomp, and Neil Young was after the goal rush.

But United had the holy trinity of Best, Charlton, and Law on the pitch and the revered Matt Busby in the dugout and, even for neutrals, that made them a team and a club to stir the heart and capture the imagination.

Poor City; even when they dethroned their rivals as champions in 1968, pipping them to the title by two points, their achievement was eclipsed just 18 days later — and forever in the history books — by Busby finally realising the dream that had survived even the horror of Munich as he saw his beloved United beat Benfica 4-1 at Wembley to become the first English side to claim the European Cup.