Moving in with the manager and his wife ended my Man City career - but I'd do it again

manchestereveningnews.co.uk:

Barry Silkman kept being told he was a Malcolm Allison player, and when the opportunity came to join Manchester City he jumped at it.

City were one of four clubs he had always looked up to growing up, and Allison - joint-manager of the Blues in 1978 with Tony Book - paid out of his own pocket for a second medical to bring Silkman up to Maine Road when the first one flashed up a knee problem.

With a brilliant debut goal at Ipswich, it couldn't have been a better start. Silkman was beginning to realise the reality of the club wasn't what he had been sold though: Colin Bell wasn't the player he used to be with injury, Peter Barnes was sold and Mick Channon was being pushed towards the exit door.The team that the former Wimbledon and Palace player had been promised he could star alongside was disappearing.

Then came another compromising situation. Silkman knew Allison's wife Sally well enough that she asked him if he would move in with the couple to help them cope with a few issues as they were about to welcome a baby into the house. "I told the lads what I was doing and that it was just for a short time because I didn’t want them to find out from somebody else," he said in his new book The Not So Secret Football Agent. "I explained why I was doing it, and they all accepted it.