Regime change on film

For all those City history buffs out there, if you haven't had chance to watch then this Granada documentary is certainly not one to be missed.

The year is 1980 and City are struggling in the lower reaches of Division One. Malcolm Allison is the man at the helm. He is undergoing his second spell at the club – only ten years earlier Allison had been a key part of City’s European Cup Winners Cup triumph.

Allison tries to arrest his team’s decline in form but as he goes about his work the threat of the sack increasingly begins to emanate from the boardroom – most starkly in the form of Chairman Peter Swales. What follows is an unusual and highly rare look behind the scenes of a club undergoing a managerial change.

There’s some fascinating footage in here: Allison’s pre and post match talks, his tactics on the training ground and the squad’s difficulty in getting to grips with the those tactics, Swales giving his manager two games to save his job, the sacking of Allison, Allison saying goodbye to his players, the interview and subsequent appointment of John Bond, and Bond’s frank assessment of his predecessor – which takes place in right in front of Allison and Swales.

Click on the links below to access the documentary. If only we had this fly on the wall stuff nowadays.

Part 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3KVEy1XKoc

Part 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3XEPJ923AQ&feature=related

Part 3 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YfQQjptuak&feature=related

Part 4 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo_fV3h2DDI&feature=related

Part 5 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAbzMloipcY&feature=related

Part 6 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLq7MvHUh7g&feature=fvw

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