Caught Beneath The Landslide

In the year when Manchester City, managed by Pep Guardiola, swept its way to another 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 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. Tim Rich has spent a quarter of a century writing about sport, starting on The Sunderland Echo, where he was the paper's cricket correspondent. He had two spells working for The Independent, sandwiched between three years as The Daily Telegraph's northern football correspondent. He collaborated with Ron Atkinson and Andrei Kanchelskis on their respective autobiographies.