Our ‘On This Day’ feature for 5th December takes a look at Manchester City’s programme for the 1970/71 season. Read our review below and click here to visit our 1970/71 page to see all the other Division One issues for the season.
The Manchester City issue for 1970/71 featured 16 pages, three and a half of which were taken up by adverts.
The cover of the programme contained the match details and a picture from a recent City fixture. For the match against Arsenal the image showed keeper Joe Corrigan denying Peter Lorimer of Leeds United. The programme then opened with a brief ‘Editorial’ column covering recent developments, while ‘City Sidelines’ contained some offbeat behind the scenes information. There were further pictures from the Leeds match, with Francis Lee and Arthur Mann in action for City.
Visitors Arsenal were introduced in ‘The Other Side’. This was centred on an article running over two pages that looked at the Gunners impressive form in what would turn out to be the club’s first double-winning season. The column described Arsenal’s football as being “stamped with an authority seldom seen since Joe Mercer’s days as captain”. The section also featured short pen-pics of manager Bertie Mee and captain Frank McLintock.
Further City content was provided in the shape of ‘The Boys in Blue’, which looked at the progress of the club’s reserve and youth teams. ‘Round and About’ focused on City’s upcoming away fixtures, with the Arsenal issue featuring a preview of the following weekend’s Manchester derby at Old Trafford, while ‘Is It True?’ offered up various extracts from recent press coverage of City. There were also several pages of stats, including results and fixtures for the first team and reserves; league tables; and a ‘league chart’ showing all the top-flight results from the season to date.
Although well presented, this was a City programme that was rather light on readable content, certainly when compared with the larger magazine-style issues starting to appear at the time.