In the year when Manchester City, managed by Pep Guardiola, swept its way to the Premier League title,Caught Beneath the Landslide examines another, very different club, also called Manchester City.
This is the Manchester City of Maine Road, of Moss Side, when the music was by Oasis and the football by Georgi Kinkladze and Uwe Rosler. It is the story of club that plunged through two divisions and then clambered back up again. It is the story of a club before the Abu Dhabi takeover, when Manchester City was run, not by a faceless sheikh, but by men like Peter Swales and Francis Lee who ran the gauntlet of supporters’ anger as season after season ran out of control.
Caught Beneath the Landslide interviews managers, fans, players and those, like the residents of Moss Side, who lived in the club’s shadow. It opens in 1989 with the 5-1 victory in the Manchester derby that propelled Alex Ferguson to the very brink of dismissal and ends with the demolition of Maine Road and the move to what would become the Etihad Stadium. In the words of Uwe Rosler: “It was a different club, a working-class club supported by the people of Manchester”.
Tim Rich, who wrote the book, has covered football in Manchester for almost twenty years. He has previously collaborated on the autobiographies of Ron Atkinson and Andrei Kanchelskis.