Rodney Marsh is all too aware of the place he has been allocated in Manchester City’s history.
When Sergio Aguero scored the 94th-minute winner against another of Marsh’s former clubs, QPR, in 2012, it made City English champions for the first time since 1968. But for Marsh, however, they might well have won the title in 1972.
“I became the pantomime villain who was responsible for Manchester City losing the championship,” Marsh said. “I accept that but it doesn’t tell the [whole] story because my four years at Manchester City were absolutely brilliant.”
The bare facts are that City were four points clear at the top of the table when Marsh was bought for a then club record £200,000 in March 1972. He scored four goals in the run-in but City won only four of their last nine games and finished fourth, a solitary point behind champions Derby County.
“I agree signing me ended up with Manchester City losing the championship,” Marsh said. “We lost it marginally and it was down to the fact they signed me.”
His candidness has brought him a long and successful punditry career, now with Sirius XM's Grumpy Pundits show, and Marsh willingly concedes he played for himself, not the team. By his own admission, he upset the balance of what was then City's finest ever side.
He was the unwitting catalyst for a civil war at Maine Road. The break-up of City’s greatest managerial double act followed. A dressing room was split. There have been few more consequential signings; few more controversial ones. There were few more charismatic players. An entertainer who had plenty of support in his time.
“Specifically if you were to ask the fans that saw me and not some rhetoric from later years, I would say that 100 per cent of the fans that saw me play live loved it,” Marsh, an instinctive crowd-pleaser, reflected. “Because we played some wonderful football, scored some wonderful goals, didn’t win anything but were a magnificent football team.”
That team he joined had won the league in 1968, the FA Cup in 1969 and both the League Cup and the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1970. But the dynamic in the managerial duo changed in 1971. Joe Mercer, the senior figure, moved upstairs to become general manager. Malcolm Allison, the innovative, inspired coach, took charge of the first team.
Allison was a long-time admirer of Marsh, who had helped QPR become the first third-division club to win the League Cup and whose goals then took them into the old Division 1 for the first time. Suffice to say Mercer was not.
“Malcolm Alisson told me he tried to sign me two years earlier and that got shot down by the board of directors and Joe Mercer,” Marsh recalled. “That would have been 1969-70 when I was having a fantastic time at Queens Park Rangers.
"Eventually what happened was Man City were a sensational football team but they were only getting 33,000 [fans] and I think Malcolm brought me in to be the thing that pushed them over the top; not in terms of winning football matches but in terms of getting crowds. On my debut, they got 55,000 people. Malcolm Allison was right about that but Joe Mercer was right that I would disrupt the team.”
Marsh was a cause for conflict between City’s most famous partnership in the dugout. His relationship with Mercer was non-existent. “I had virtually no contact with Joe Mercer,” he said.
He was more effusive about Allison, a left-field thinker who was touched by brilliance but could also be the architect of his own undoing.
“Malcolm Allison was a genius,” said Marsh. “A genius in the sense that anybody that is controversial, controversially successful, with brand new ideas, confident in their own ability but with the caveat that he could always slip off the edge that goes between genius and madness. Malcolm Allison, in the period I knew him, did both. He went from genius to mad in equal measure.”
Signing Marsh, some felt, may have fallen into the latter category but the relationship between maverick manager and flair player was so close that Marsh submitted a transfer request when Allison quit in 1973.
Rewind a year to his arrival and, as he put it succinctly: “Malcolm Allison desperately wanted me and Joe Mercer desperately didn’t want me.” That mirrored feelings across the club. Marsh was plunged into an impossible position.
“I was just this guy from London coming up to Manchester,” he said. “I walked into a hornets’ nest. It completely changed the dynamic of the club: not only the team, the club.
"Because of Rodney Marsh there was a falling out of the directors, there was a falling out of the managers, there was a falling out of the chairmen and there was a falling out of some players.
“Because Allison signed me, I think Joe Mercer left the club, I think directors resigned, I think the chairmanship changed. I divided the entire club, including players.
"Mike Doyle was one of my most vocal critics. He said you never win anything with a player like Rodney Marsh. How can you have harmony in a team with a player saying things like that? The only constant was the crowd that stuck by me.”
They sang his name to the tune of Chicory Tip's 1972 hit Son Of My Father. One way or another, Marsh's name was on everyone's lips.
He was a belated replacement for Neil Young, the scorer of the winner in the 1969 FA Cup final. While Marsh helped Francis Lee end the 1971/72 season with 35 goals, the chemistry in the side changed.
“My relationship with Francis Lee was fantastic,” Marsh said. “He carried on scoring goals, I assisted a lot of his goals and got penalty kicks for him to score penalties and Franny had an absolutely magnificent season.”
But, as he accepted, something altered when he joined. “As you go through life, you have the luxury of being able to look back and think, I will just tell it like it is and the way I upset the balance of the team is that I played football for me,” he admitted.
“I put myself first and I wanted to play the best I could play and I put the team second. I wanted the fans to enjoy the Rodney Marsh experience and I wanted them to be a part of it. I played my entire career that way and I make no apologies for being that kind of player. Ultimately, I wasn’t a team player.”
Those of a younger generation sometimes bracket Marsh alongside Faustino Asprilla, another individualist bolted on to a title-chasing team of entertainers in a mid-season move. Like Marsh a quarter of a century earlier, the Colombian scored some goals for Newcastle but has been remembered as the man who cost them the title in 1996. There is one significant distinction, Marsh feels as harks back to the excellence of Maine Road’s main men.
“Manchester City were a great team. Newcastle weren’t,” he argued. “If you want to make the analogy, I upset the balance of a great team, Asprilla upset the balance of a good team. There is a massive difference in that.”
