BIG-money signing Michael Robinson might well have got off to a flyer when he scored his first Manchester City goal against Brighton.

But a year later it was the visitors who came to his rescue after he’d endured a torrid time playing under Malcolm Allison.

In only the third game of Albion’s debut season (1979-80) among the elite of English football, the centre-forward Allison had signed from Preston North End for a bumper £750,000 fee scored from the penalty spot at Maine Road.

City were already 2-1 up courtesy of goals by Paul Power and England international Mike Channon; Teddy Maybank had replied for the Seagulls. Unfortunately, centre-half Andy Rollings had been forced off injured and his replacement, Paul Clark, pulled down Ray Ranson to concede the spot kick that Robinson fired past Eric Steele in the visitors’ goal.

Albion had a gilt-edged chance to get back in the game when Peter O’Sullivan was upended in the 18-yard area but skipper Brian Horton’s spot-kick went the wrong side of Joe Corrigan’s right-hand goalpost. Peter Ward did manage to pull a goal back four minutes from the end but City held on to claim all the points.

Robinson, as I described in my recent blog post, became a big TV personality in Spain in later life but he had plenty of admirers as a player too.

Looking back on his season at City, writer Mark McCarthy said: “A tireless, wholehearted centre-forward, he found himself leading the line for a City side in decline, with the weight of a then-substantial transfer fee doing little to ease the pressure on his young shoulders.

“Even so, Robinson produced moments that hinted at his considerable talent. None was more memorable than his superb strike in City’s 2-0 derby victory over Manchester United – a goal that quickly endeared him to the Maine Road faithful.”

City went 18 league games without a win in the second half of the 1979-80 season before a late revival of only one defeat in the last eight matches – by which time Robinson had been dropped. Even so, he was the leading scorer with nine goals in 35 appearances.

In an interview with journalist Simon Hughes, recorded in Madrid in 2017, Robinson opened up about his struggles at City, describing his time there as “a f***king nightmare”.

Aged just 19 when City came calling, he went from earning £30 a week at Preston to £330 a week at Maine Road.

“I was built up to be a wonder boy,” Robinson told Hughes. “The season opened with a game against Arsenal, and I was playing Alan Ball – a Blackpool legend. He was a World Cup winner and had moved for a fraction of what I’d gone for when he left Everton for Highbury. He was a great player and I was a nobody.”

Robinson experienced a divide between the older players and the younger players. “There seemed to be a lot of jealousy from the older ones towards me because of the figures involved in my transfer,” he said. “I was young and did not know how to deal with it.

“I lived in Wilmslow in a house that was upside down. I spent my afternoons upstairs and slept downstairs because people would come looking through my window by day. I was frightened to go into supermarkets. I couldn’t handle the pressure. It sent me round the bend.”

It also didn’t help that he didn’t get on with boss Allison. On his first return to Maine Road after his £400,000 move to Brighton in the summer of 1980, Robinson said in a piece by Manchester Evening News writer Peter Gardner for City’s matchday programme: “Malcolm Allison and I just didn’t see eye to eye – it became inevitable that I would have to leave the club.

“It was a total conflict of ideas; Malcolm wanted me to do things I didn’t think I was capable of doing. He was asking me to play wide up front, on my own or on the wing…crazy things like that. It just wasn’t me. All I ever wanted to do was to be successful for City as a centre-forward, my best position.

“But Malcolm somehow got these ideas that I should play anywhere except that one, and I could never agree. Being messed about like that was making me a poorer player. In those circumstances, I just had to leave.”

I wrote in a previous blog post about Robinson’s time with Brighton which began well but was often dogged with controversy. He himself described moving to Brighton in the summer of 1980 as a rehabilitation and in Alan Mullery he found someone who knew how to manage him.

“At City, I’d fallen out of love with football and seriously contemplated what I was going to do with my life,” he said. “Alan was a real gentleman and he saved my career. Brighton was the right place to go for me at the time, because I was fed up with the pressure.”

He told the MEN’s Gardner: “Alan Mullery told me from the outset that he wanted me to play just as I always wanted to play and I shall be always grateful to him for that. I am thoroughly enjoying my football once again. And that is certainly a relief after all the agonies and frustrations I went through in the latter part of my stay at City.”

Three months into the new season, although Albion ended up losing 2-1 when they hosted bottom-of-the-table City at the Goldstone Ground, Robinson managed to score against them.

The game came a fortnight after Allison and managerial partner Tony Book had been sacked. Even though the visitors were reduced to 10 men early in the second half, when big-money signing Steve Daley was sent off, Dennis Tueart scored two in 11 minutes.

Ten minutes from the end, Robinson seized on a rebound to pull a goal back for Albion when debutant Andy Ritchie’s thundering drive came back off a post.

He was on the scoresheet against City at the Goldstone the following season too, when Albion beat John Bond’s side 4-1 in pouring rain, all the goals (Ritchie, 2, and Gary Williams the other Albion scorers) coming in the second half.