Manchester City vs Gillingham, 20th anniversary: Paul Dickov on punches, penalties and Wembley drama

Maine Road, Christmas 1998. Manchester City are a goal down to Stoke and facing yet another setback in what is turning out to be a difficult first year in the third-tier of English football. Now halfway through the campaign, Paul Dickov and his team-mates are trying and failing to lift the club up from its lowest ebb.

“I’d been lying to you if I said there wasn’t a few things said at half time, a few things thrown, a few punches thrown as well,” Dickov remembers. “The point of it was that talk is cheap in this changing room now. We’ve all got the answers but we need to go out there and actually do it.” Was he one of those throwing punches? He smiles. “I wouldn’t like to say.”

Gareth Taylor, now City’s under-18s manager, was part of that 1998-99 squad. “The fans were really demanding. They didn’t want to be in that league. They saw we had an opportunity to move up and the pressure was on. They let us know about it at half-time – they let us know about it most of the time. It was high pressure, a bit of a cauldron.”

City rallied to beat Stoke 2-1. From that point onwards, Joe Royle’s side suffered only two further defeats in the league. 12 wins from their remaining 23 games secured a play-off place and on Thursday, the 20th anniversary of their spectacular victory in the final at Wembley will come to pass.

The game is remembered for its late drama, with the deadlock only broken by opponents Gillingham striker Carl Asaba after 81 minutes. Taylor was immediately brought on as a substitute, shortly after the desperate search for an equaliser began. “I literally came on, I think it was a goal kick to Gillingham, ball got punted down the middle, next thing 2-0.” His namesake, Robert, had doubled the lead.

What followed has made legends of the players who were apparently exchanging punches in their dressing room just a few months earlier. Kevin Horlock pulled the first goal back in the 90th-minute and Nicky Weaver’s penalty shoot-out heroics were to come later, but the moment replayed to this day before every game at the Etihad is Dickov’s stoppage-time equaliser.

“When you’re playing, people say what was it like when you scored your goal and your celebration. I can’t even think,” Dickov says. He does not remember trapping the ball on the edge of the penalty area and rifling it a few inches underneath the crossbar, but he can recall the sensation of getting one over Gillingham goalkeeper Vince Bartram, once the best man at his wedding. “There is nothing better than getting one over your mate or reminding him of it a few years later.”

“Just relief,” is how Taylor remembers that moment. “I just had this overriding feeling. I remember going around speaking to the players in that period before we started extra time. We’ve got this. We aren’t come back like this to now go and lose it. There was a lot of guys were saying that, a lot of guys. We just had this feeling that whether we win it in extra time or on penalties, we’re winning this. They’re gone.”

Not quite. City could not find another goal in extra time. Dickov missed his penalty in the shoot-out, beating Bartram again but seeing the ball bounce off both posts. Thankfully for him, a dreadful penalty by Adrian Pennock and Weaver’s two crucial saves from Paul Smith and Guy Butters rendered his miss irrelevant. City returned to Division One at the first time of asking, securing back-to-back promotions the following season.

1999 was far from the end of the ‘Typical City’ days. Those would not be banished until the Abu Dhabi takeover some nine years later. And yet, 2-0 down in the final minutes of a play-off final, it was the moment that the club could have either stayed down on the canvas or fought its way back. “I dread to think what might have happened [if we had lost],” says Dickov. “If you believe what people were saying, the club would have really struggled.”

Instead, 20 years on, City are celebrating a domestic treble. “If anything it’s been magnified more by the success the club has got,” he adds. “Maybe 10 years ago fans would stop in the street, thank us for the goal in the game and that would be it. Now, the club are dominating football at the minute and with the football that they are playing, it makes it more iconic and nicer for the fans to think that 20 years ago we were there, 20 years later we’re winning Premier Leagues and breaking all sort of records.”