The above was the first game I ever attended.
The first game I remember SEEING was on (black and white) TV, the last half-hour of the 1953 (Matthews) Cup Final Bolton v Blackpool. I saw it on my return from the Saturday afternoon matinee at the Kingsway cinema. After Roy Rogers, Flash Gordon and Batman I went home and saw Stanley Matthews weave his magic. Our living room was full of people I didn’t know, as we were among the first people in our street in Fallowfield to have a TV set (bought in preparation to view the Queen’s coronation a few weeks later).
The following (?) season at the tender age of six I was taken by my Grandad onto the Kippax to see City play Chelsea at Maine Road. City have been a part of my life ever since and I still remember so many things about that day. It must have been in the early months of 54 or 55 (wish I’d kept the programme) because I remember writing to my cousin in Sheffield all about it, filling many pages of a writing pad (with elves on it!) that I had been given for Christmas. After receiving my l-o-n-g epistle describing the game in great detail, he wrote back after some months, saying, “Well I’m not very interested in football” (well he WAS from Sheffield).

We lived in Fallowfield, and Grandad and I walked through Platt Fields to get to the game, round the lake with the pleasure boat stabled for the winter, past the bandstand and out onto Platt Lane, and through the maze of little streets surrounding Maine Road. I recall it was dark after the game (were there any floodlights then at Maine Road I’m sure there weren’t, I think I remember them being put in many seasons later) and we missed the park closing so we had to walk home a real long way round down Hart Road and Wilbraham Road and Moseley Road ( I think this was necessary after most games). In the years after this, when I got a bit older, visiting Maine Road for 1st and 2nd team games (we used to get about 20,000 for the reserves—and it seems like about 30,000 for City Res v Rags Reserves?), I came by bike, at first through Platt Fields, and then later from East Didsbury when we moved house. My Dad and I stabled our bikes in any one of the backyards (though we had our favourites) where you could leave your bike –was it for 6pence (2p in today’s money) or 3 pence? I don’t think you locked your bike in those days when leaving it there?

For my first game I had a skyblue-and-white hooped bobblehat that my Mum had knitted for me ( my Mum had seen City’s Cup-winning run of 1934 and could name most of the players from that team) and a skyblue rosette, also handmade by her for the occasion. I remember the problems she had making the bobble around a piece of cardboard.
I went with my Grandad, who must have been a City fan since the early 1900’s because he never tired of telling me he had seen Billy Meredith flying down the wing at Hyde Road and you could touch him as he flew past. Grandad had of course also been in the 84,569 record crowd at Maine Road in 1934. At the Chelsea game he tried to get me on the white wall beside the pitch on the Kippax at the Platt Lane end of the ground, opposite the penalty area, but although it was long before kickoff all the spaces on the wall were already occupied by other kids, so little me stood about 3 rows back, seeing probably only half the game. I best remember the hoots of derision when Chelsea appeared in cherry red shirts and what looked to be silk ivory-coloured “knickers” (as they were called in the programmes of those days). I guess it seemed to prove for all to see that what Northerners had always liked to think about southern football teams, and especially London ones, was true.
From our standing position, just as football matches look now from such a low elevation, the game looked all legs and bodies flying in everywhere, very physical, not the beautiful game at all. I can remember all the above, and lots of the team members on that day, but I can’t remember the score! (and I don’t actually remember any goals!). I think it was a draw?? Perhaps there is a City archive somewhere so I can find out, I’d love to know.

I think my Grandad decided it was too crowded at a first team game for a 6 year old because for a while after that we went absolutely regularly to the Reserves games (the “stiffs” as lots of people, including Grandad, used to call them). I don’t remember my NEXT first team game but I do remember meeting the City players in the 1955 Cup Final team (v Newcastle), they all signed my souvenir brochure in a mass signing session (we queued for HOURS) in Lewis’s department store in Market Street. And when I DID get to start going to first team games (about 1956 I think), always sitting legs-astraddle on the white sloping walls of the same one (toward Platt Lane end) of the (3?) tunnels leading through and onto the Kippax.
I was an absolute regular, and later as a teenager (still long pre-Bell and Lee and Summerbee), a regular home and away. Mrs (Don) Revie was my cousin’s teacher in my primary school and I remember also seeing Roy Warhust watching the movies with his wife at the Essoldo cinema in Chorlton and getting his autograph on the inside of my Dad’s cig packet (what year would that have been?).
Finally I’d like to dedicate this little report to my dear Grandad who took me to my first City game, so creating now well over A HUNDRED YEARS supporting City in our family since he went to HIS first City game.