One down, 37 to go

It may have only just begun but I think you’ll agree it’s already been a pretty crazy season in the Barclay’s Premier League!

A quick scan of the league table tells its own story. At the top, free-scorers Fulham and Swansea are duking it out for the title while West Brom find themselves in a strong position to bag a Champions League place come the end of the season. Meanwhile, down at the bottom and Liverpool and Manchester United are in crisis as two giant clubs flounder in and around the relegation zone. The shadow of the guillotine hangs provocatively over Liverpool’s straight-shooting middle-manager Brendan Rodgers while United’s big money acquisition of Robin Van Persie has so far been an unmitigated disaster, the grey-haired Dutch philanderer spending most of his time picking splinters out of his arse on the bench without a single goal to his name for his new club.

I am, of course, being entirely facetious but the above is fairly akin to the sort of knee-jerk, reactionary bullshit which tends to permeate the football world around this time of year. If a new manager hasn’t gotten his team off to a flyer on the first weekend of the season then it’s surely only a matter of time before he finds himself out of a job, while new signings are seemingly branded expensive flops if they haven’t scored a double hat-trick on their debut. It can therefore only be assumed that many football fans and writers are either senseless morons or there’s something about this sticky weather that temporarily warps people’s heads.

Thankfully, City fans are unlikely to adopt the same kind of fuckwittery at this stage of the season this time around. Having delivered the club’s first league title in 44 years last time out, manager Roberto Mancini practically walks on water for most of us and we’ll probably have to wait at least until he loses two games on the bounce somewhere around the busy Christmas period before the press file their annual report of disharmony in the camp. It probably has a lot to do with the fact that City have kept most of last year’s title winning squad together over the summer and even more to do the fact that this season began in exactly the same way as the last one ended, only with fewer grown men weeping on their knees at the end.

It is quite spooky how similar the QPR and Southampton games were though. On both occasions, City were expected to win comfortably and led by a goal at the break only to have their nonchalant start to the second half torn wide open thanks to two gobsmacking goals from their plucky opponents following a combination of poor defending from us and quick counter-attacking by them. Edin Dzeko once again scored his trademark equaliser before the Blues once again managed to grab a dramatic late winner (although Samir Nasri’s strike on Sunday wasn’t nearly as dramatic or late as the Sergio Aguero goal which preceded it). It may well just be a case of history repeating itself but you almost get the feeling that the whole thing was planned for the benefit of Sky TV(“I swear you’ll never see anything like this ever again” sounds a bit daft now, doesn’t it?). An erstwhile non-football supporting acquaintance of mine once bored me with his conspiracy theory that everything that happens in the Premier League nowadays is a complete set-up making it more and more like WWE every year. I’d be lying if I said I couldn’t see where he was coming from at the moment.

On a more serious note, I do hope we’ve learned our lesson at the second time of asking. Although results at the end and the beginning of the season often only provide minor snapshots of the bigger picture, the fact that City have scraped 3-2 wins in their last two competitive games (three if you count the Community Shield) against inferior opposition shouldn’t be overlooked. Perhaps Mancini has finally had enough of everyone slagging him off for his boring, negative tactics and will instead throw caution to the wind this season with a cavalier “it-doesn’t-matter-how-many-you-score-we’ll-just-score-more” approach to matches. Either that or he’s been given a DVD of the Kevin Keegan promotion season in 01/02 and thinks it looked like a good laugh. Roberto, if you’re reading this, I preferred it last season when we were “boring” and breezed past teams by a comfortable four or five goals, so let’s have some more of that please.

Daniele De Rossi, the one that got away

Thankfully, it won’t be long until the transfer window slams shut again and we can all switch our attentions back to the situation in Syria or something of equal importance instead of scouring the back pages for the latest yield of the Rumour Mill (or “Bollocks Factory” to give it a more deserving moniker). For City, the slightly underwhelming signing of Scott Sinclair from Swansea appears to be a mere formality away but HRH Sheikh Mansour still doesn’t seem to be any closer to really getting his wallet out, meaning it’s unlikely the club will have made any significant improvements to the squad before the 1^st of September. Whether that proves to be a mistake remains to be seen and there’s a lot to be said for building a team around a nucleus of stability, but one failed transfer that admittedly did disappoint me somewhat was that of the bloke with a girl’s name who looks like he buys his shirts from the same place as the much loved late TV prankster Jeremy Beadle, Daniele De Rossi. In case you missed it, De Rossi toyed with our emotions this week by calling a Hugh Abbott style press conference in which he announced that he (drum roll...) wouldn’t be leaving Roma anytime soon. Why he felt the need to gather the nation’s press for such a pointless announcement is a mystery but at least we now know that the Italian midfield mentalist won’t be donning a sky blue shirt this season after all. Get yourself on Twitter Dani lad, it’s much more convenient.

If, like me, you’ve spent most of the summer telling anyone who’ll listen that Kun Aguero is about to blossom into one of the greatest forwards the game’s ever seen then you’ll have been delighted to hear that the worrying knee injury sustained in the first few minutes of the Southampton game isn’t nearly as bad as first feared. Thankfully, the Argentine dreamboat is expected to be back in action after the international break in a few weeks time meaning we can all breathe a huge sigh of relief. I can’t tell you what went through my mind when he went down clutching his knee in the 7^th minute on Sunday but “having kittens” would be the understatement of the millennium. In Joe Hart, Vincent Kompany and Yaya Toure we have a strong spine of a team, but if you ask me, a long term injury to any of them would be a much easier pill to swallow than if it happened to Sergio. Make no mistake, the guy is going to be crucial to everything we do this year and I pray he stays fit and doesn’t give us anymore scares like last Sunday.

So, with one game down and three points on the board we travel to Anfield at the weekend, a ground which has been a mostly unhappy hunting ground for as long as I can remember for City. Brendan Rodgers started life as Liverpool’s manager in a similarly comical fashion to his predecessors with a 3-0 defeat to West Brom last weekend but you’d expect them to come out fighting in their first home game of the season and will no doubt provide a tough early season test for Mancini’s men. As last season proved, every single point on the quest for title glory is a valuable one but that doesn’t mean we should get too carried away if results don’t go our way during the league’s embryonic stage.

I’m not a betting man by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m still willing to wager that (hilarious though it’d be) neither Liverpool nor United will be embroiled in a relegation battle this season, nor will Swansea or Fulham win the title. Call it a hunch.

Dan Burke

The title defence starts here

It’s been three long, cold, barren months since the thrilling conclusion of the last campaign but this weekend, finally, football is back!

We’ve had a summer (in the loosest sense of the word) packed wall-to-wall with sporting drama and achievement but throughout which I’ve found myself constantly pining for the bread and butter of club football, my one true love. I detest the summer months, I really do, and the start of the new Premier League season can’t come soon enough as far as I’m concerned.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the Olympics much more than I thought I would (I didn’t think I’d enjoy them at all) but I’m extremely monogamous when it comes to sport and my relationship with anything other than football extends no further than the occasional mild flirtation when all’s said and done.

You see, my sporting calendar runs strictly from August to May and anything outside of that is no more than an unwelcome distraction. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the hard work and skill it takes to be the best at sprinting, or gymnastics, or cycling (or even f*cking dressage!) but I’m simply unable to replicate the tribal connection I seem to have always had with football and no amount of post-Olympic hysteria is going to change that.

The English football season in full bloom is a supremely interesting and engaging phenomenon and 2012/2013 for Manchester City promises nothing less. The wonders of last season are now a thing of the past and City, as reigning champions, will be expected to mount a strong challenge for both domestic and European honours this time around. The bar has now been set and anything less than a major trophy or two will be deemed an abject failure from here on in. Reaching the top is tough, but staying up there will be City’s greatest challenge yet.

If there’s one thing that usually goes some way towards brightening up the mundane close season it’s the transfer window. Since the club’s takeover in 2009, the transfer window and all the bullshit and conjecture that goes with it has provided almost as much entertainment as the football itself to City fans. This summer began with the promise of more stellar names but has so far only yielded the slightly underwhelming signing of the promising but injury-plagued Jack Rodwell for £15 million (a virtual free transfer by our standards) from Everton.

City have assembled a very talented and dependable squad at great expense over the past few years and there was naturally always going to be a time when the big spending would need to be reined in with the transfer policy instead focused on minor tweaks here and there. That time appears to have come this summer and it seems those responsible for player acquisition at the club must also be mindful of UEFA’s proposed Financial Fair Play regulations due to the relatively quiet and humble nature of our business dealings this window.

The lack of summer transfer activity may have been a slight source of frustration for the fans but the person at the club with perhaps the biggest grievance appears to be Roberto Mancini, who voiced his discontent by publicly criticising Brian Marwood, the club’s football administrator, in a press conference ahead of last Sunday’s Community Shield. Although Mancini may well feel he’s entitled to bitch and moan on the subject, surely even he must acknowledge that he’s already been furnished with one of the finest and most bloated groups of players in world football and simply cannot continue spending big money on new signings until some of the deadwood (I’m looking at you Roque) has been moved on. I hate to break it to you Bob, but you can’t always get what you want.

If City have had a quiet summer, the same cannot be said of their direct competitors in the Premier League who all appear to have made significant improvements to their squads in an attempt to challenge Mancini’s men for the title this time around. Chelsea’s signing of Eden Hazard from Lille early in the window was a huge statement of intent while Manchester United’s purchase of Robin Van Persie (which at the time of writing is imminent) will undoubtedly be regarded as something of a game changer as the new season looms large. Even Arsene Wenger has dipped into the transfer market this year meaning City are effectively the only one of the title contenders who could be accused of standing still when the smart move might be continual forward motion. If nothing else, it’s nice that for once a summer appears to have slipped by without City and everyone associated with the club being blamed for the ruination of football as we know it, although even the acquisition of a young, English player with a questionable injury record at a reasonably low fee has drawn derision from certain sections of the football world. Ever get the feeling you simply can’t win?

If proof were needed that City’s squad as it currently stands is more than capable of challenging for honours in the coming season then it came last Sunday when the club lifted its first Community Shield in 40 years following the 3-2 defeat of Chelsea at Villa Park. Although the win wasn’t exactly the “footballing lesson” City found themselves on the receiving end of in last year’s Community Shield, it was still an extremely encouraging performance with the Blues looking a cut above their opponents from first whistle to last. It would of course be foolishly pre-emptive to judge a team based on one showpiece friendly against a side who played over half of the game with 10-men but City’s display was as bombastic as one could hope for last week and we can only hope they are able to reproduce that kind of form in the opening weeks of the season.

An oft used cliché in football refers to a player who, for whatever reason, has had a long absence from his team and is therefore “like a new signing” when he finally returns. Although Carlos Tevez made his official comeback from his 6-month golfing sojourn at the back end of last season when his goals and performances gave City a much needed edge in the final push for the title, it’s not unfair to suggest that he was expectedly ring rusty and ungainly during that period. While most of us expected Tevez to finally depart for sunnier climes this summer, he has in fact done the complete opposite and regained his sharpness and focus at the perfect time for himself and the club. ‘El Apache’ looked well and truly back to his best in the Community Shield and will have a major part to play this season if he can keep his mouth shut and concentrate on what he does best.

City begin their quest to regain the Premier League title on Sunday as they entertain (hopefully a ridiculous word when used in this context) newly promoted Southampton at the Etihad Stadium and will be expected to hit the ground running with a thumping home win. It’ll be interesting to see how the Blues line up in the first game following Mancini’s apparently successful trial of a new 3-5-2 formation for much of pre-season though even that feels like more of the natural evolution of this team than a tactical revolution (A-Ha!). Anything less than three points in the opening game of the season will be considered nothing short of disastrous but it would be extremely foolish to take the Saints lightly and you expect City will have to be at their best to avoid an upset.

With the dust of the Olympic Games still settling you could be forgiven for believing that there is something of an agenda of antipathy towards our national game in the media at the moment, especially if you happen to pay any heed to The Sun’s Rob ‘Beastly’ Beasley (which I don’t). Make no mistake though, football is alive and well and this writer couldn’t be happier.

The time for talk is almost over, the title defence starts here. Come on City!

This Is How It Feels

I’d say it was sometime around 4:40pm on Sunday the 13^th of May this year when I found myself staring into the abyss.

I could only watch from my seat in the South Stand at the Etihad Stadium as my dearly beloved Manchester City trailed 2-1 to 10-man Queens Park Rangers with just five minutes of normal time remaining on the final day of the Premier League season. It was a match that had meant everything to us, and it wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Only an hour earlier, the thousands of people around me had been a colourful sea of excitement and anticipation, but when I looked up at twenty to five I saw dejection, anger and disappointment. Some of them cried and some of them upped and left. Like most of them, I stayed and watched as the dream of a first league title in 44 years drifted further and further away.

I won’t lie, I wanted to leave, I really did. City had been chasing the game for a good twenty minutes by this stage but hadn’t even looked like scoring one goal, never mind the two they’d need to win the title. I don’t know if it was a misplaced pass or yet another unchallenged header back to the half way line by a QPR defender that clinched it for me, but I’m ashamed to admit I gave up and just couldn’t bear to watch any longer.

I thought about heading for the exit but I felt too nauseous to move. I also knew my mum, who was sitting beside me, simply wouldn’t allow it. A million thoughts raced through my mind as I held my head in my hands and fought back tears.  I thought of everything this godforsaken club had put me through during my years of support and devotion. I recalled the occasional highs but mostly the interminable lows, and how they all paled into insignificance when compared with this, the almightiest of cock-ups, playing out before my very eyes. The phrase “typical City” had never felt as apt as it did right then.

I also thought of United, who I’d rightly assumed were still leading at Sunderland and moments away from pipping us to the title on a day when even they’d admitted it was beyond them. I conjured up the cruellest and most vile of images; Ferguson and Rooney dancing in celebration on the pitch as they held the trophy aloft, the back pages of the newspapers the following day, and the horrible rats who would no doubt emerge from the sewer to laugh, chastise and gloat on my way home. It was a day that had promised so much but which I knew would take me months, maybe even years, to recover from if it ended like this.

As the fourth official raised his electronic board to signal five minutes of added time, I thought of something else. I thought of the Division Two Play-Off Final at Wembley in 1999 and the two dramatic goals in five minutes of extra time that day that had so enchanted my 11-year-old self and condemned me to this life of City addiction. I remembered how I’d begged my dad to stay and watch when a much lesser City team had gone 2-0 down to Gillingham, and how what had seemed like childish naivety had paid off when he’d cried on my shoulder not long afterwards. It was a comforting thought, but it did little to ease my despair in that moment.

That was until, right on cue, the latter day Kevin Horlock (played by Edin Dzeko) popped up and scored a goal which would have been scant consolation had the game finished 2-2 but gave City a beaming glimmer of hope. My body was still paralysed with grief but in my head I began to dream again. The thousands of people around me came back to life, their spirits resurrected.

What happened in the ensuing few minutes cannot be described in mere words, and I should know. On several occasions over the past three months I’ve attempted to find a way to articulate the plethora of emotions I experienced that day and every time I have failed. There are probably few people left on the planet who aren’t familiar with the moment I’m referring to, but with 93 minutes on the clock Sergio Aguero had played a tight one-two with Mario Balotelli and glided into the penalty area beyond the futile flailing legs of half a dozen QPR defenders before slamming the ball into the back of the net to win the Premier League with the last kick of the season. Words like “ecstasy” and “exhilaration” are all well and good, but they do it a disservice and seem inane and dispassionate when I think of how I actually felt.

That goal, much like Paul Dickov’s in 1999, was on a par with nothing else I have ever experienced in my life. I am passionate about many things, but never have I exhibited such an explosion of joy as I did in that moment, never have I shouted, cried and laughed simultaneously and never have I completely lost myself as I did right then. The unenlightened will find it ridiculous, but it’s testament that in the aftermath of what will rightly be remembered as the finest end to a Premier League season in history, the impact of City’s glory on all kinds of people was totally apparent as the YouTube videos and tributes flooded in from across the globe. It may have taken millions of pounds worth of “oil money” to achieve, but the manner in which City became Champions on that beautiful sunny day in Manchester was incomprehensibly awe inspiring, and everyone agrees.

A lot of demons were banished that day and it will live long in the memory of everyone who was alive to witness it. We've already been told that we'll never see anything like it ever again, and maybe that's true, but the future is unwritten and I can only hope that I will once again feel the way I did on the 13th of May.

This is how it feels to be City.