Blue Mania: Dave Wallace, King of the Kippax

The Thursday before the Chelsea game, and I take the bus to Leigh to visit Dave Wallace, editor of the long-running city fanzine King Of The Kippax. Dave picks me up at the station. He’s football fan size, ginger bald with the wisp of a goatee, wears a City polo shirt. Looks a bit handy. He’s read the site and has me pegged as a Red. It’s early and last night’s Carling Cup exit to West Brom is clearly still jangling in his system.

After the North Stand season ticket holders fiasco (at the beginning of the season fans were asked to move to make way for a family stand, before being invited to move back when the protests got loud) it’s a sign that even in these fairy tale times the club don’t always get it right. “I like to think we keep them on their toes,” he says.

We drive to a neat little estate in the suburbs. I ask what he does for a living. He’s retired. He was a project manager at the airport in charge of implementing baggage systems and air bridges. I say something about ‘kit’ and he corrects me: these could be multi-million pound systems spanning the entire airport. We go to the living room to talk about the fanzine, and quite quickly we’re on to the subject of Heysel.

As a football fan who travelled for work he’d been in Brussels the week before the game. “There’d been warning signs.” With the exception of the Italian immigrant community the locals were staying away.” The stadium was crumbling. It was known.

Bradford happened and then Hillsborough, and within a few years the Taylor report had been published. The ID card scheme was blowing about. Dave joined the Football Supporters’ Association. As the conversation progresses he throws out names - FC United director Andy Walsh, United We Stand editor Andy Mitten – and harks back to the birth of the influential fans’ groups.

The love affair with City began at eleven, with the ill-fated ’55 cup run. The next season he managed to catch about half a dozen games, including the FA Cup quarter final victory over Everton in March ’56 which drew 76 000 fans (“they were climbing up the floodlight pylons”).

After that he followed them through thick and thin: the relegation of ’63, the glory years of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the decline following Allison’s second term, rebirth and relocation in the new century. He started the fanzine back in ’88, having written for one of its predecessors, Blue Print. “It frustrated me what you’d read in the Evening News about the match. I wanted to know how many City fans were at the game, what songs they were singing and how they reacted. And that just never came out in the reporting.”

Issue No.1 was knocked together on a typewriter borrowed from work and featured items on Heysel and the ID cards scheme. Wife Sue did the cartoons. The fanzine cost 50p and the first run sold out. Issue 2 saw the introduction of staples and a wrap-round cover sheet. They kept up a steady diet of campaigning, terrace views, past player profiles and season retrospectives, mixed with familiar, semi-scurrilous fanzine fare (they once grassed up the team for being drunk in St Ann’s Square on a Friday night).

By the early ‘90s Dave had been appointed Fan on the Board as part of the deal that bought Frannie Lee to Maine Road (before a bust up with Lee brought that to an end) and the fanzine had hit a circulation of 4,000.

I catch up with him after the Chelsea match at his pitch at the back of the South Stand. The current issue has Joe Hart on the cover and features articles on Joe Mercer and Ken Barnes and a plethora of fan frustration at the doings of the Eastlands hierarchy since the start of the season. It’s second week selling – most issues go in the first – but he reckons he and his vendors will get rid of a few hundred copies in the 15 minutes before and after the game.

He’s annoyed by the segregation of away fans outside the ground, though. Campaigning has resulted in the establishment of the City Square, and he clearly takes great pleasure in the atmosphere. But the barricades leading the away support from the home support are an unnecessary anachronism at the behest of the police, he tells me, and clearly rankle.

After the North Stand season ticket holders fiasco (at the beginning of the season fans were asked to move to make way for a family stand, before being invited to move back when the protests got loud) it’s a sign that even in these fairy tale times the club don’t always get it right.

“I like to think we keep them on their toes,” he says.

City are up to fourth. “I’m pretty well pleased,” he grins. “I mean, we’ve not got our full strength squad yet. We’ve got players coming back from injury. And I think David Silva did very well. He’s had a little bit of criticism about being lightweight but he’s a nice little footballer.

“And that was a fantastic goal from Carlos Tevez. It didn’t look on did it? We thought he should have passed to Silva but he tucked it away nicely himself.”