Wembley, 30 May 1999: the Division Two play-off final stands at Gillingham 2 Manchester City 1 and as the clock reaches 95 minutes Joe Royle’s side face another season in England’s third tier.
Now, though, the ball drops to Paul Dickov and in front of the No 9 is Vince Bartram, Gillingham’s goalkeeper and also the best man at his wedding. With a sweet strike Bartram is beaten and Dickov sends City fans into ecstasy and himself on a knee-surfing celebration that has become an iconic image in the club’s rise to become England’s dominant team.
Having been 2-0 down with four minutes left, City pulled one back on 89 minutes through Kevin Horlock, and after Dickov’s equalizer go on to win 3-2 on penalties after extra time and the next year are promoted to the Premier League.
The victory proves a pivotal point in City’s history as Sheikh Mansour might not have bought the club nine years later and begun a £1bn-plus investment that has yielded four Premier League titles, two FA Cups and four League Cups.
Dickov says: “If anything it’s been magnified more by the success. Maybe 10 years ago fans would stop in the street, thank us for the goal in the game and that would be it. Now, the club are dominating football and with the football that they are playing it makes it more iconic and nicer for the fans to think that 20 years ago we were there, 20 years later we’re winning Premier Leagues and breaking all sort of records.
“I dread to think what might have happened if we hadn’t have won. If you believe what people were saying, the club would have really struggled. It’s probably just as well we didn’t realize how important it was as it would have put more pressure on us.”
Of smashing his crucial finish beyond Bartram, Dickov says: “There is nothing better than getting one over your mate or reminding him of it a few years later.”
Dickov missed in the shootout. “Kevin Horlock does remind me that he scored and scored his penalty and doesn’t get any credit,” he says.
Dickov was signed by Alan Ball in August 1996, City having just been relegated from the Premier League. The turmoil then is illustrated by Frank Clark becoming the Scot’s fourth manager before the end of the year, Ball leaving four days after Dickov joined and then Asa Hartford, Steve Coppell and Phil Neal taking over (Hartford and Neal as caretakers). Only when Royle was appointed in February 1998 did City stabilize.
“Joe Royle deserves a lot more credit than he gets for getting us back up,” Dickov says. “When you look at Premier League teams now they have a squad of 25 – he had 56 because each manager that came in was allowed to sign his own players, then he’d get sacked, another manager would come in, sign another load of players and would get sacked.
“At one point we had three first‑team changing rooms – for the ones that were playing and the ones being sold. That can create a poisonous atmosphere. Joe, how he managed that whole thing was amazing. He managed to get the players out that he wanted to get out, keep the players happyish who wanted to leave but didn’t, and have his first-team squad as well.”
A season in a Division Two that included Macclesfield and Wycombe was memorable. “We went down to Layer Road, Colchester’s old ground, on a Friday night,” says Dickov. “The kit-man had to get the players out [of the dressing room] so he could put the kit down. It was impossible to do with the players in there at the same time, but that’s great.”
City’s fans backed their team admirably. “At Christmas we were 12th,” the 46-year-old says. “We were still getting 30,000 fans coming to Maine Road. Every away game we went to, the fans did not just take over the ground, they took over the towns and the cities.”
Being 1-0 down at the interval to Stoke City at Maine Road in late December was a nadir. “I’d been lying if I said there wasn’t a few things said at half time, a few things thrown, a few punches thrown as well,” Dickov says. City responded to win 2-1.
“The point of it was that talk is cheap in this changing room now. We’ve all got the answers but need to go out there and actually do it. We turned it around, and I think we only lost one or two games from there. It seemed the worse we got as a team, the more fans wanted to back us.
“I always remember the first game of the season, we played Blackpool at home. The thought process of the boys and a few conversations among the boys were: ‘How many are going to turn up?’ Manchester City are in Division Two here. If we don’t score early, are they going to get on our backs? It was a roasting hot day and there were 33,000 fans screaming their heads off as if we were still in the Premier League. That really did give us the impetus and drove us on to get promoted that season.
“So to see the success the club is getting now, winning a fourth Premier League, it’s amazing.”
(The Guardian)
