Blue Moon, a candid narrative of a year in the life of Manchester City, exposes the many facets of a football club down on its luck and knocked out into the old third division of the professional English football league pyramid. Although there are as many away league fixtures as home fixtures, Maine Road is, largely, the setting of Mark Hodkinson’s reports about Manchester City’s effort to climb out of the Nationwide League Division Two on the first and, so the partisan home support hope, only occasion. Third tier football for Manchester City was anathema to their loyal supporters; an average crowd of over twenty eight thousand people was by far the highest in the league, only Stoke City coming anywhere near. The author’s prose is easy to read, at times witty, incisive and sometimes cheeky if not a little risky in places. The main body of writing consists of the weekly articles he had published in The Times over the course of the 1998-1999 football season. While the red part of Manchester clinched the Treble in their European Champions League final against Bayern Munich, Manchester City were in an end of season scrap against Gillingham in a playoff final at Wembley. Manchester City were more TSV 1860 Munich than Bayern Munich. I last saw the Maine Road stadium when I passed by it on a bus from Didsbury to Manchester city centre in 1994; the stadium has since been demolished, making way for a housing estate. The only remaining feature of the Maine Road football pitch is the centre spot, preserved as a patch of common land amid modern builds. Hodkinson has penned a lasting account of Manchester City’s presence in the lower leagues, along with the likes of York City and Oldham Athletic, both clubs now in the National League System, tiers five to ten, administered by the Football Association. The last word comes from a contribution by a Manchester City fan in a section at the end of the book featuring comments by the club’s fans to reflect on their season; Toh Hsein Min writes “When City win the European Cup in twenty years time, I’m going to tell my children I was there at Wembley . . . . “ Min was four years premature in his prediction but accurate in his forecast, Manchester City are the current club champions of Europe!