This Is How It Feels To Be City

Manchester City’s years of living dangerously are upon us.

This isn’t an attempt to dissect Financial Fair Play yet again. I can refer you to Stefan Borson’s contributions on the pod and the blog that are as authoritative and informed as the traditional football media’s analysis has been trite and slanted. It is an attempt to write about what it feels like. Let’s be honest. This season was drifting badly. Cup competitions were still there to pique our interest, but for the first time in years, the last three months of the league season is an exercise of going through the motions. In 2015 and 2016, there was sufficient jeopardy about Champions League qualification to retain a focus to the end. In 2017, there was the steady post-Christmas improvement as Guardiola’s methods bedded in. In 2020, we are so certain that will finish between second and fourth (and fourth is very unlikely) that we may even have the compensation of Saturday 3pm kick off at the Etihad in April or May.

But now we have a cause, a reason for the team to play with thunderous intent and the fans to get behind them as we are all in this together. The text banter I dealt with last Friday was split almost 50/50 between the usual piss-taking – they are my friends, I will forgive them – and “Congratulations on winning the 2020 European Cup.” The narrative is written. It’s either a bizarre exit, probably at least partly attributable to VAR, or we win the thing, David Silva is handed the trophy in his last act as City player while Europe laughs and Pep finds Javier Tebas in the VIP party, walks up to him, turns his back, drops his designer trousers and moons at him. It’s one or the other.

But isn’t it great to feel the world is against us? Last season was weird, with almost universal support from fans of other clubs as we held off Liverpool. Lovely, but is that really us? I now feel transported back to the era of the classic Kevin Cummins photo shoot of the Gallagher Brothers at Maine Road wearing the white pinstripe “brother” shirts. We’re the defiant outsiders, looked down on as barely tolerated undesirables. We don’t quite know how the future will play out. But for all of that, we have something that others covet and do not have. In 1994 it was an intangible authenticity. We were hardscrabble, working-class, avowedly Northern but also touched with creativity and modernity. In 2020, it’s the unspoken feeling among rival fans that we are certainly not entirely in the wrong and may well be very substantially in the right. By day three, the abuse had turned to “if you’re going down, you’re taking plenty of others with you” and my Tranmere supporting mate saying that the Prenton Park PA system would be able to do “Zadok the Priest” full justice.

It is our blessing and curse to know a lot of United fans. We all know that Gary Neville spoke a huge proportion of them on Sky before the Chelsea match. Twitter is not real life. We’ve also got a Wembley visit to look forward to against a traditional and relatively friendly rival. There was a danger that these trips were becoming routine. Let’s thank Yves Leterme for putting that to bed for a long time. We’re going to enjoy that one even more than normal. The same is true of the FA Cup. These are important trophies to win that we will respect and enjoy. We also want to win them badly, and thanks again to our friends in Nyon for laying on the ideal siege mentality we need to make sure standards do not drop as they have in some recent matches.

I’ve not played “Definitely Maybe” all the way through for a very long time. But I am today, and maybe I need a glass of red wine and pictures for my walls of Rodney Marsh and Burt Bacharach. Because those days are back. I expect the stadium to be raucous, witty and alive like it was in 1994. I expect it to become an uncomfortable place for visiting teams. But this time, we have better players. Instead of David Brightwell, we have Aymeric Laporte. Instead of Mike Sheron, we have Aguero. Instead of Andy Dibble, we have Ederson. It’s going to be fun. Managerially, I will stick up at length for Brian Horton, a man who’s always welcome at City, but we have moved on. And the rest of the stuff – we can’t control that beyond making the observation that Khaldoon Al-Mubarak and Ferran Soriano are also a huge upgrade in the boardroom. Stick on Live Forever and Rock n Roll Star on loud and enjoy the next 100 days.