DVD
Bolts From the Blues
200 Great City Goals!

Starring: Manchester City Football Club
Fremantle Home Entertainment
RRP: £17.99
FHED 2020
Certificate: E
Available 04 December 2006


Manchester City football club has had a long and successful history since it was first formed in 1880. Like an unsure Saturday night date, the club tried on a number of different names before it finally settled on its current Nome deplume of Manchester City in 1894...

So, what do you buy for the Manchester City fan that has everything? Well, how about an eighty-seven minute DVD stuffed full of the best two hundred goals from the last fifty years? Why only fifty? Well, although I'm sure that there were many great goals before that, sadly fans had to wait for the invention of television to capture these magic moments.

Obviously, as the goals are spread over such a long period the picture quality can be very variable and the audio is vanilla stereo. You can play the disc as a continuous feature, which gives you a bare bones narration before you're straight into one goal after another.

Apart from the variable picture quality the biggest problem with the disc is that the goals are not placed in any historical context. Colin Bell and Mike Summerbell feature, but there is no acknowledgement of the importance of their signing by Mercer and Allison or how this combination took City from its position of relegation to the second division in 1963 to winners of the League Championship two years later. The period covering the late sixties to the early seventies was a golden period for City, but the disc just shows goal after goal. This problem continues through all the decades that the disc covers, which means that in the end you learn nothing about the history of the club, leaving little in the way of interest for the casual viewer.

If you don't feel like watching the disc as a feature then you have the choice of any of the fifteen chapters. The chapters cover each of the decades on offer - from the sixties to the present day, as well as allowing you to watch goals by type: netbusters, longshots, headers and a whole lot more.

The DVD is only going to appeal to a very niche market, though if you or someone you know is a City fan then the DVD will make an excellent gift. However, there is little in the way of interest for anyone else. The DVD could have offered so much more for a very small effort.

Charles Packer

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£13.49 (Amazon.co.uk)
   
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£13.99 (Play.com)
   
£11.99 (HMV.co.uk)
   
£13.99 (Blahdvd.com)

All prices correct at time of going to press.