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It was an April’s day in an era when Manchester City were still playing at Maine Road and a visit from Manchester United was a lot more daunting than it has been in recent years.
City were on the attack. The ball was swung over from the left into the penalty area. Gary Neville was never going to beat Niall Quinn, the 6ft 4in (193cm) City striker, in an aerial contest. Another player in blue was waiting for Quinn’s knockdown. And that was the moment Martin Tyler’s voice went up an octave in the Sky Sports commentary box.
“My goodness, what a story! Mikheil Kavelashvili! On his debut, in a Manchester derby. Well, it’s a long name to splash across the back of a Manchester City shirt. But it will be splashed across a few headlines if City go on from this…”
Mikhail Kavelashvili equalises against Manchester United — his high point at City (Tony Marshall/EMPICS via Getty Images)
It’s funny how it turns out sometimes. That was about as good as it got for Kavelashvili during his brief dalliance with the Premier League towards the end of the 1995-96 season. United won the league, as they often did in those days, and for the last three decades, Kavelashvili’s contribution has been largely consigned to the dustbin of history by those City fans who remember the era of tragicomedy that resulted in Alan Ball’s team slipping towards relegation.
Kavelashvili has been back in the news and you can probably understand the collective surprise among former team-mates to learn that the pale-faced wearer of City’s No 32 shirt has re-emerged as a far-right politician and president-elect of Georgia, known for his sympathetic stance towards Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
“That’s a story I didn’t think I’d ever hear,” was Quinn’s verdict when The Athletic broke the news to the striker who set up Kavelashvili for his derby goal. “He was a lovely, smiley, mannerly young lad and so happy to be in Manchester — no edges at all.”
Kavelashvili was nominated for the largely ceremonial role last month by the Georgian Dream political party, just a few weeks after its re-election sparked protests in the streets amid accusations the vote was rigged and influenced by Russia.
The 53-year-old, described by former team-mates as “quiet and unassuming”, was elected to parliament in 2016 and, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, set up a splinter group called People’s Power.
Opponents accuse Georgian Dream of being pro-Russian and say its hardline beliefs will cause irreparable damage to the nation’s chances of joining the European Union. Nonetheless, Kavaleshvili’s presidency is all but guaranteed, given the vote is made by a 300-seat electoral college dominated by his own party.
Kavelashvili is now a leading figure in the Georgian Dream party (AP)
The election takes place tomorrow, with the inauguration on December 29, ushering in a 46-cap ex-international striker who has become increasingly known for his anti-Western statements. In June, Kavelashvili used social media to accuse the United States of having “an insatiable desire to destroy our country”. His political opponents, he says, have been steered by U.S. congressmen who are planning “a direct violent revolution and the Ukrainisation of Georgia”.
All of which seems a long way from the days when City were grubbing around for points towards the bottom of the Premier League and the 24-year-old Kaveleshvili was signed for £2million ($2.5m at current rates) from Dinamo Tbilisi, with the job of scoring enough goals to keep his new team in England’s top division.
“It could be argued that Kavelashvili spent most of his time at City facing in the wrong direction, just as he now seems to be doing as the prospective Russia-apologist leader of Georgia,” says Simon Curtis, a City fan, writer and author.
“He was bought on the say-so of (fellow Georgian) Georgi Kinkladze who told the somewhat gullible Alan Ball that he was, ‘Even better than me’. It was a desperate throw of the dice, just after City had been tonked 4-2 at West Ham. There were six games left and he looked lightweight and confused (against United) but he did score our equaliser.”
Unfortunately for City, Andy Cole restored United’s lead within a minute of Kavelashvili making it 1-1 and United ended up winning 3-2. Kavelashvili’s first appearance in English football — also marked by him missing a good chance to score a second, only to shoot straight into Peter Schmeichel’s face — was equally memorable for a mutinous outburst from Uwe Rosler, the striker who had lost his place to the new signing.
Rosler, a former East Germany international who infamously wore a T-shirt bearing the message ‘Rosler’s Grandad Bombed Old Trafford’, was seriously unimpressed to be left out. Cue an angry flare-up when Rosler came off the bench to score City’s second goal and ran to the dugout, jabbing an accusatory finger at the home manager.
“It wasn’t the happiest camp at times,” says Quinn. “I was angry that I wasn’t in the team for long periods. Uwe was angry when he was left out.
“We had Kinkladze, who had very little English. Georgi did all his talking on the ball, he was a wizard. The best way to describe him was that Alan Ball didn’t call him Georgi, he called him the ‘little genius’ — ‘Give the ball to the little genius’.
“Then Mikheil came along and he was a totally different player. He didn’t have Georgi’s skill or ability but he was honest and hard-working and he had something that he fought for. I found him a lovely guy. He was proud and patriotic to be Georgian. He had a little more English than Georgi and I remember he seemed particularly happy and proud that he was playing for Manchester City.”
Kavelashvili with Niall Quinn on his City debut (Mark Leech/Offside via Getty Images)
Kavelashvili played in a 3-0 defeat at Wimbledon and a nervy 1-0 win over Sheffield Wednesday but was not trusted by Ball to start the final game of the season at home to Liverpool — an occasion that will always be remembered for City’s players wasting time by the corner flag when they were drawing 2-2, thinking that would be enough to save them from relegation.
They had been cruelly misinformed: another goal was needed to stay up. It never arrived and, in Curtis’ words, Kavelashvili “came on as a late sub to be part of the relegation party”.
“I remember the game against United when he scored on his debut,” says Keith Curle, the former City defender. “But I also remember he had two big chances in the Liverpool game that saw us relegated.
“If you watch it back, he had two chances inside the six-yard box in the last 10 minutes. That’s not to blame him, it’s just the plight of the centre-forward. You can have one touch and be the hero. Or you can miss a couple of chances and it’s all about the ifs and buts and what could have been.”
Quinn, who won 92 caps for the Republic of Ireland, has never forgotten that match, either. “I have a memory of our centre-half Kit Symons scoring (to make it 2-2) and almost getting another one late on. We were scrambling for a goal in the last couple of minutes. Kit got on the end of a cross. Mikheil was running out of the way but the ball hit him on its way in and rebounded out, when it might have been the goal that kept us up.”
Relegation led to Quinn leaving the club for Sunderland. Kavelashvili, meanwhile, hung around for a season in the second tier, then called Division One. He underwhelmed again and a recent post by the Monument City fan blog summed up his contribution.
“He was different at least to Quinn and Rosler and cleared the low bar of being better than (fellow striker) Gerry Creaney,” writes its author, Mark Meadowcroft. “But he was not the sort of player we needed in the second tier. It soon became clear his main role was, as we had suspected all along, to be Kinkladze’s pal.”
Kavelashvili did pop up with a goal in a 3-1 defeat at Crystal Palace and, six months later, he headed in City’s equaliser in a 1-1 draw at Grimsby Town. That, however, was it from the man whose political party has recently pushed through laws similar to those used by the Kremlin to crack down on freedom of speech and LGBTQ+ rights.
Kavelashvili was proud to represent Georgia (Tony Marshall/EMPICS via Getty Images)
Curle remembers his former team-mate being “very quiet, very unassuming, he mixed in well without ever being the star of the show or seeking the limelight… an intelligent man who never held court in the changing room or came across as politically minded”.
Sadly for City, the man in question was never a prolific scorer either, as City finished the 1996-97 season in 14th position, below Barnsley, Port Vale and Tranmere Rovers. “By the summer of ’97 nobody had even noticed he had gone, so little impact had he made,” says Curtis, author of City in Europe and a long-time authority on Mancunian nostalgia. “Kinkladze had his mum in Manchester cooking Georgian specialities for him, so there was definitely a worry he (Kinkladze) might be homesick.”
In total, Kavelashvili scored three goals for City in 29 appearances. It was not for him that a Georgian flag fluttered in the Kippax stand. But maybe, given his new occupation, he learned a thing or two about what constitutes good and not-so-good leadership. City did, after all, have five managers in his 12 months.
His first seven appearances came in Ball’s relegation XI. There were four with caretaker manager Asa Hartford, another four during Steve Coppell’s 33-day spell in charge, seven with Phil Neal and, finally, seven under Frank Clark, who remembers the Georgian as “a good character, a nice lad, never a problem for me in the dressing room” — and, unlike Kinkladze, never sent his parking fines to the club.
Kavelashvili, pictured with ex-France international Christian Karembeu in 2018 (Vano Shlamov/AFP via Getty Images)
It was not enough to secure a renewal of Kavelashvili’s work permit and the rest of his playing career was spent at clubs in Switzerland and Russia, winning the 1998 Swiss league title with Grasshoppers.
“I don’t think I have had any other former players go into politics,” says Clark, reflecting on Kavelashvili’s imminent position as the second ex-City player after George Weah, the former president of Liberia, to become a head of state.
“I obviously didn’t have much of an influence on him. Good luck to him, though, if he is going to be dealing with Putin, although he might find Putin is easier to deal with than I was.
“I am joking of course… I hope I am a nicer person than Putin.”
Additional reporting: Paul Taylor
(Top photos: Dan Goldfarb for The Athletic, top image: Getty Images)
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