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Tony Book. Mr Manchester City. Skip. One of our greats. Yet few fans have specific memories of him playing. Not necessarily because we didn’t see him play, just because he went about it so quietly. He wasn’t known for dashing overlaps or canny underlaps; flair or vision; passing or dribbling. And he certainly wasn’t known for his goals, though he did score four – or was it five – in his 315 games. Booky was a solid, tough-tackling right-back with a fair bit of pace, despite looking as if he should be on standby for a Dad’s Army XI.
When we were kids, City fans wanted to be Franny Lee, “King” Colin Bell or Mike “Buzzer” Summerbee. Nobody wanted to be Book. Yet his was the most remarkable story by far. Anthony Keith Book, who died this week aged 90, represented possibility. The triumph of hope over expectation. The ultimate football dream. Take an ageing brickie off the building site and turn him into a top-class footballer at an age when most players were thinking of retiring. The fact that he wasn’t phenomenally gifted made it all the more romantic.
It was Malcolm Allison who spotted his potential. Booky liked to tell the story of Allison climbing the scaffold at a building site where he was working to introduce himself as the new manager of Bath City in 1962. Book had spent his footballing life turning out for Bath as a semi-pro for £4 a week. He was already 28 going on 50. From then on, they were inseparable. Wherever Big Mal went he took Book. Briefly, and perhaps most unlikely, to Toronto. Then back to Plymouth where Allison invited Book to smudge his age on the forms so he could tell the board he’d signed a promising twentysomething . Nobody in their right mind would have splashed out £1,500 for an ancient full-back.
And that was just the start of it. When Allison went to City in 1966, the 32-year-old Book duly followed. They made for the oddest of couples. Allison, unbelievably flash with his fedora, cigars, birds and big mouth. Book, modest, reserved and old-fashioned, looking like he’d just stepped out of Dickensian England.
He won player of the season in his first year with the club and was made captain of a team that had almost as many superstars as the red rivals across town. For Best, Law and Charlton, City had Bell, Lee and Summerbee. But it was the unassuming ex-brickie who led them to glory – the league title in 1968, the FA Cup a year later – when he was named footballer of the year alongside Dave Mackay, another achievement as exceptional as it was unlikely – then both the League Cup and European Cup Winners Cup in 1970. Unprecedented success. Four major trophies in little more than two years.
There are hardly any clips of Book playing. Partly because so little football was televised, but mainly because he was so unobtrusive. One of the rare bits of footage is in the astonishing 4-3 win at Newcastle in 1968, which saw City pip United to the league title by a two points. We see Book unfussily head a certain goal off the line, boot the ball into the crowd just before half-time, and sprint over to nick the ball off a Newcastle forward just in time. Classic Book – unshowy, workmanlike, vital.
The images we remember are of Skip as a winner – hoisted on Mike Doyle’s shoulders with the FA Cup, or shaking hands with a young Princess Anne – her red coat and black hat perfectly coordinated with City’s red and black stripes – when commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme says the skipper is almost too tired to get up the stairs. Well, Book was already 35 at the time.
The hugely successful City team of the late 1960s and early 1970s was largely made up of local lads from the north-west. They thought of themselves as family, and to an extent, they were. Defensive midfielder Alan Oakes was the cousin of left-back Glyn Pardoe, whose daughter Charlotte went on to marry Scott Doyle, the son of Mike. But it was Book, born on the other side of the world in Bath, who came to personify Manchester Blues more than any of them. At Brentford on Tuesday, City fans paid homage to Book with suitably old-fashioned songs – “Once a Blue, always a Blue” and “Tony Book’s blue and white army” sung till we were hoarse. Book had City blue in his soul, and remained an essential link with the old days as the club’s honorary president.
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As a player and manager he would do anything for the club. True to form he started off managing in the most unglamorous way – as a caretaker when Johnny Hart got pancreatitis in 1973. He then got the job full-time a year later after the dour Ron Saunders was sacked.
I just missed out on the glory years but was at Wembley in 1976 to see Dennis Tueart win the League Cup for City with a majestic overhead kick. City fans dined out on that victory for a long time. We had to. The club didn’t win another trophy for 35 years. The following season was even better, despite not winning anything. We lost out to Liverpool by one point in a wonderful title race. That was Book’s best team. Great to watch – fast, flamboyant, classy, with a pair of wingers (Tueart and Peter Barnes) twisting the blood of opposing full-backs long before Alex Ferguson came up with the phrase.
When he failed to build on that, Book was sacked. Typical of the man he took it in his stride, didn’t say a bad word and sounded almost grateful for the opportunity of being given the boot. He came back four more times as caretaker manager. Even if he was just running the club for a single game we knew we were in safe hands.
Book represented an age of innocence that will never return. An age when City triumphed simply because they were, briefly, the best. Our recent success, fuelled by Abu Dhabi money and brilliant management, has been joyous in its own way. But no matter how beautiful the football or the number of records broken, it will never equal Skip’s achievements for purity or surprise.
