Monday morning may be a time for doing things differently for football fans following the Club World Cup from the Gulf.
That will be the moment when Al Ain, 2024 AFC Champions League winners, take on Manchester City, 2023 Uefa Champions League winners, in a Club World Cup Group G fixture in Atlanta.
City won their first group game, while Al Ain slipped to a heavy defeat by Italian giants Juventus. If the consensus is that you should win your second game in the group stages of summer tournament football, then everything will be to play for in Georgia, in a game that kicks off at 5am UAE time.
For those looking to be guided by history, the precedents for City appearing in Atlanta and playing Al Ain provided a mixed bag.
Many people may remember the first time these two sides met, in a post-season friendly 11 years ago, when newly crowned English champions City beat Al Ain 3-0 before a capacity crowd at the recently opened Hazza bin Zayed Stadium.
The National’s match report from May 2014 noted that the two sides “put on a show. City were serenaded as much as their Garden City counterparts, each flick or piece of skill celebrated irrespective of the performer”.
It was genuinely a joyous post-season match, capped by City’s club captain Vincent Kompany, who did not feature in the game, doing a ceremonial lift of the Premier League trophy for delighted fans only days after securing the title in England. Goalkeeper Joe Hart raised the League Cup aloft for good measure.
The first time City played in Atlanta, their destination on Monday, the side were also champions of England, having won the title on the final day of the 1967-68 season, but the match didn’t pan out in quite the same way.
This was the City team that the late sportswriter James Lawton once described as capable of playing the beautiful game with “heartbreaking ambition”. Yes, they really were that good, but in the summer of 1968 – a period of disruption, protest and change in the US – City were humbled by the Atlanta Chiefs, the champions-elect of the North American Soccer League.
The contest was billed in local media as the Chiefs playing their “first international match against the number one team in England and one of the best teams in the world” when it was announced in the spring. City went on to play a handful of other matches on their North American tour.
Any suggestion that the Atlanta side might give City a decent game was described as an “impossible dream” in the build-up to the match. As is often the case in football, the sporting script writers had other ideas.
City went a goal up early on, but Atlanta were on level terms by half time. The home side scored two more goals in the second half, before Francis Lee stole a late consolation for City.
The match finished 3-2 to the Chiefs and Jesse Outlar’s column for The Atlanta Constitution the following day mentioned how “excited boosters mobbed the Chiefs” after the final whistle and declared that the big crowd at the game “couldn’t have cheered louder if the Braves had won the seventh game of the World Series”.
The Chiefs won the inaugural NASL title later that year, but went out of business in 1981, although soccer thrives in the city in the modern day and Atlanta United won the MLS Cup in 2018.
Sixties City’s Atlanta story should have ended there, but the club’s mercurial management duo of Joe Mercer and Malcolm Allison delivered another twist in this tale, requesting and securing a rematch before they flew back to the UK in the middle of June, such was the upset and shock caused by the result of the first game.
On the day of the game, The Atlanta Journal, the city’s afternoon newspaper at the time before it merged with The Atlanta Constitution to become The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, ran an open letter to American football fans penned by a Manchester Evening News journalist. The letter’s headline was blunt and direct. “Manchester City will massacre Chiefs”, even, it said, in the absence of four of the team’s top players due to international commitments or non-availability for the overseas trip.
City lost the rematch 2-1. Star striker Lee made a passing post-match reference to the Manchester side being unable to cope with the summer heat, but was also gracious in defeat, conceding that “Atlanta played well, really well”.
Grainy black-and-white television footage of the game exists on YouTube, although it provides a stark reminder of how difficult the game is to follow when it is stripped of colour and multiple camera angles. Within a few years, guides to that era would only refer fleetingly to City’s “disastrous" overseas tour of 1968, without going into any further detail.
City returned to Atlanta in 2010 for the pre-season International Soccer Challenge as part of a longer US tour, where they played out a score draw with Mexico’s Club America, although the Manchester club won the game on penalties.
History may not be the best guide to what may happen this month, although we can say with certainty there will be no rematch in Atlanta this year, whatever the result on Monday. One might also add that the summer of 1968 really was a different time.
