Time For Heroes

Last night we saw a City great play his last game at The Etihad. Pablo Zabaleta was not just the Premier League's best right back for the 2010's though. He was a symbol of a link between the players on the pitch and the fans off it.

We all have our own stories as to where we were on the last weekend of August/start of September 2008. I woke up on the Monday morning and switched on Sky Sports News to see that Vedran Corluka was likely to make his switch to Tottenham as we had just bought a 23 year old Argentine attacking full back called Pablo Zabaleta. He, and the signing of Glauber Berti, got sorta lost in the mix of what was to come as City were taken over by new owners, reports of bids for Berbatov and David Villa being thrown around and eventually signing Chelsea-bound Brazilian play maker Robinho for over £30 million. Only 15 months earlier, City had finished a season with scoring 10 goals at home. Times were about to change significantly.

Not just on the pitch either. Garry Cook had reflected on the facilities of the club at Carrington needed a huge overhaul of improvements. Since the move away from Maine Road, the club didn't seem to have a direction apart from sell anyone of any worth. The only serious investment the club had been given until this point was the previous summer when former Thai president Dr. Thaksin Shinawatra had taken over from Wardle. We were a big PR stunt for Dr. T and despite being worth £2billion, he was actually skint. Typical City to get a skint billionaire.

Although not part of the club long before the takeover, Zabaleta walked into pre-takeover City. Not won a trophy since 1976 City. The City that I and a lot of people who will read this grew up with. I will be honest - I wasn't sure on him at first. I thought he went to ground too early and seemed like a mistake/red card waiting to happen, similar to how a lot of people view Otamendi now in a way. He moved from right back into midfield in the early part of 2009 scoring his first goal against Wigan in a 1-0 win. As time went past and the team gradually got better and better he wasn't always a starter, but you felt better when he was on the pitch. He played either side as a full back or could fill in in midfield. His work rate and determination made him able to be adaptable, and his adaptability made him popular with the fans as he never seemed to grumble about being moved around.

He and Micah Richards were battling head to head on a weekly basis for the right back position. Both loved by the fans at this point in 2012, but it wasn't clear who was ever number 1. The run-in for the 2012 title he made the position his own, and he pushed on to be City's player of the season in the 2012/13 season. From then until this season, he was first choice unless injuries played a part.

But what Zabaleta means to the fans is more than just a successful career. He embraced the club. He became a City fan. He loved Manchester. Opting to live in Didsbury over tucked away in a Cheshire mansion and often recalling how he'd go in the chippy and play pool in The Barleycorn before it shut down. He was on the pitch last night calling his son a Mancunian.

In the first half of his career he was lucky to be around people like Richard Dunne, Nedum Onouha, Joe Hart, Shaun Wright-Phillips and the aforementioned Richards as they had been part of the furniture at City for many years. But Zabaleta and Kompany, who had joined the club a few weeks earlier, became City people and the effect they had on the players purchased over the next few years is easy to see.

Seeing the faces of players like Joleon Lescott, Nigel de Jong, Mario Balotelli now warms the hearts of a lot of City fans because there seemed to be a bond between the players and with that there was a bond between them and the fans. Zabaleta mentioned the 1-0 win against United at Wembley as his highlight - when I think about that game I think about the players and staff running over to our end at Wembley and doing the Poznan in front of us. Something as simple as that goes a long way as a short term buzz and a long term love.

With Zabaleta gone, Joe Hart seemingly gone and Kompany on the edge of breakdown, the players who seemingly love the club are hard to be seen. Sometimes I watch these great players and it seems like they're at City on loan and going through the motions of a football career. I know people who really like players like Raheem Sterling, Leroy Sane and John Stones - the investment and ability of these three in particular suggest that they are players the club are pinning their hopes to for the future, but they don't have a bond with the support in the same way. They cannot have stood there last night taking it all in and not think "I want a bit of this when I go". They don't have that connection yet - and again I don't think this is anything to do with them not winning anything or ability. Now is their time to stand up.

Similarly with the manager. Find me someone who feels more positive emotions towards Guardiola than Mancini and you'll find me a liar. "This is for all of the fans" - Mancini said at about 17:00 on May 13th 2012, Pellegrini didn't say anything like that when he won the league and if we ever do with Pep, I doubt he'll say that, he'll probably say the football is amazing or something. Embracing the fans, getting the fans on side is important. Slagging off the size of the club, the atmosphere or the pressure is just bullshit excuses for your short comings.

I know some people "get it" and others don't. Frank Lampard, a legend of a rival, embraced the club more in the 12 months he was at the club more than Gael Clichy has in 6 years. It's just a fact of life and it's not for everyone - I've not mentioned my three favourite players in this whole blog because none of them are particularly like Zabaleta or Kompany but at the same time they do have a real connection due to their achievements on the pitch, hence why most games you hear chants of Sergio, Yaya or David.

Pablo is a legend but now a part of our past. I'm hoping last nights admiration of him and his legacy is to enthuse the current crop of players and staff to embrace the club and Manchester the way he did. If they don't they're in danger of leaving the fan base disillusioned.

R.I.P. The Deadman

Anyone that's ever read anything put out there by me is aware that my biggest interests are football and music. But I have to hold my hands up and say I have a guilty pleasure. I've had three periods of my life where I have had a love affair with professional wrestling.

Before you start, I'm very aware that the majority of 29 year old men that are still interested in this form of entertainment should probably have their hard drive examined. I know it's scripted. I know from the outside watching big guys fake fight in daft outfits for the purpose of a soap opera story line is frankly ridiculous. And it is ridiculous. I know it is. The enjoyment I get from it is something I cannot really explain in the same way I have previously explained a masterclass from David Silva or a lyric from Pete Doherty.

Similar to football and music, my awakening to wrestling began in 1994. When I think about my earliest memories, I cannot think much about starting school, but I can remember being sat with my Dad in the Main Stand when City beat Tottenham 5-2 in October 1994. I can remember hearing, "Whatever" by Oasis in December 1994. But first, I can remember Royal Rumble 1994. It was there I saw Yokozuna and many other wrestlers gang up and take out a character that I really took to. The Undertaker. In a time where most wrestlers were larger than life individuals with bright colours and over the top shout-y promos, The Undertaker was dark, mysterious and left the talking to his manager Paul Bearer. This mysteriousness is probably what attracted to me to Slipknot as a 13 year old before they took their masks off.

He was off screen for sometime, and other performers and future Hall Of Famer's Bret Hart and Razor Ramon got me further hooked on to this form of entertainment. The Undertaker returned at Summerslam in August 1994 to have a match versus an imposter Undertaker hired by The Million Dollar Man Ted Dibiase. For years I believed this to be some of the most fascinating bits of entertainment, only to watch it on the WWE Network awhile back to realise it was in essence crap. But I was young and excited. The Undertaker was my favourite and I looked at him on TV in the same way I would look at Uwe Rosler, Niall Quinn or Keith Curle. My Dad took me to the NEC in Birmingham to watch it. He hated it, but I can still remember the feeling when the lights went off and The Undertaker's spine chilling entrance began. City weren't exactly giving me plenty of thrills in 1995, so this made up for it.

I've always had a good memory when it comes to useless information. I can almost track things in the world/life because I remember who City were playing round that time - maybe not to the same extent but I can almost do that with wrestling too. I stopped watching around 1996 for reasons I'm not sure. History tells me that the WWE was at a low point around this time, as Diesel and Razor Roman, two of the biggest characters of the era defected to rival company WCW. Around this same time, the amount I went to City decreased a lot. Not because we were going into our worst point in over 120 years of history, but because I was playing football myself at a later slot in the day for my local team. As good as my memory is, no wrestling and football have left me with a void in 1997 and 1998.

The 2nd love affair started in early 1999 (ironically as City went on our great run to get into the play offs and then win the final). I'm not sure what it was that got me watching again, but it was different to the show I had stopped watching. And I was hooked. It was a bit odd to see people like The Ringmaster now being Stone Cold Steve Austin, the face of the company. Some young guy called The Rock was a big deal (although no one would have predicted how big Dwayne would become). And my favourite The Undertaker had transformed from an almost Western mortician good guy to a massive goth bad guy in his role as the Lord of Darkness amongst his group - The Ministry.

I won't go into it too deeply on here, but this was during The Attitude Era - a time where WWE had shed it's family entertainment which got a 6 year old Liam hooked into a non-PG product aimed at teenagers and young men. The language and the content went hand in hand for a generation who watched South Park. I was 11 and the WWE was the most exciting thing on TV. And loads of my mates watched it too. When I was younger I was one of the few lucky ones who had Sky TV and I watched it all on my own. But I can remember loads of my mates watching Raw on Friday nights, staying up for Pay Per Views (PPVs) if we were off school. I used to set our VHS for the PPVs that were on during term time and I'd pass the tape round my friends during the next week.

My favourite PPV of all time is Fully Loaded 1999. The card for the night had big personalities and great characters littered throughout it and the main event was the top good guy Steve Austin vs The Undertaker - the top bad guy, in a first blood match. In hindsight, an 11 watching two grown man fighting til someone bleeds isn't probably on, but of course you didn't care at that age.

The Undertaker took a further change after a bit of time off to recover from injuries. His evil massive goth character was in need of a revamp, and in May 2000 at Judgement Day he made his return, now as a Harley Davidson biker character - a character closer to the real life Mark Calloway. He interrupted the last few seconds of a 60 minute Iron Man match between The Rock and the new biggest bad guy, Triple H. He attacked Triple H and his entourage who were beating down The Rock. The Undertaker came down to the ring on a motorbike with Kid Rock's "American Badass" song playing and basically beat up about 7 guys on his own - the sort of situation which is so unlikely to happen in the real world, but it perfectly acceptable in wrestling. Even 17 years later, I don't think I've seen a crowd react to a return to the ring like this (although The Hardyz coming back at Wrestlemania 33 was huge) - if you've never seen it, check it out.

Around 2001/2002 I lost interest again. The Attitude Era effectively ended when they decided to turn Steve Austin into a bad guy at Wrestlemania 17, and the "Invasion" story which happened for the following 6 months is widely considered the worst booking (sorry to use wrestling terminology, I've tried my best to avoid it throughout!) ever in wrestling. I was 13/14, music was becoming more important to me and as I was fortunate to look about 10 years older than I was at the time, I was the guy to turn to to buy alcohol. And sitting round parks drinking £1.89 4 litre cider seemed more interesting than wrestling...

And then we fast forward a lot to January 2014. Someone on my Facebook had shared a post from Mick Foley. Mick was one of my heroes 1999/2000 as Mankind, and his book "Have A Nice Day" was and is a great read, probably the first widespread publication to acknowledge wrestling being fake and gave an insight to every aspect about wrestling. Mick had slated the company for not putting Daniel Bryan in the Royal Rumble - 20 years after I first saw The Undertaker. I found this very interesting - someone so respected slagging off the company that he's always going to be connected with. In football terms it's like reading that Steven Gerrard has called Jurgan Klopp a waste of space, or something. Why has he said this? What's happened? So I did a bit of reading and watched Raw for the first time in 13 years. It was a different show to what I was used to. The language and content was a lot safer, but the athleticism was much improved. Without watching it all the time, I was interested in it again so I stayed up and watched Wrestlemania 30.

I could see Bray Wyatt had a big future in the company, and was really impressed with the three members of The Shield. But for me and many others the stand out moment was Brock Lesnar vs The Undertaker. Yes, him again. 20 years after I first started watching, The Undertaker was still as big and relevant as ever. His career actually started in the WWE in late 1990 and from then to 2014 he had a record of 21 victories to no losses at Wrestlemania - the biggest event of the year. The Streak as it was known had become a centrepiece match of wrestling, as big as a title match. It was thought that it would never end, but at this years event, Brock Lesnar beat The Undertaker. It was shocking, I remember feeling shocked and if you've never seen the faces of people seconds after the 3 count I encourage you to go to Google or YouTube and seek them out.

The mystery of The Undertaker had never gone away either. He spoke more than he did in the early 90's but he was still The Undertaker - he never broke character.

His performances were few in the years since I got back into it, however his appearance at Wrestlemania was always something to look forward to, despite the ending of The Streak. Fans fantasized about dream matches for him vs John Cena or Sting and now in his 50's fans speculated when he would retire.

In the build up to Wrestlemania 33 this last Sunday I scratched my head a bit about what was going to be the headline event for the night. As more matches went past I was thinking "When are they going to put on 'Taker vs Reigns?" About 2 hours into the 5 hour spectacle I wondered if they were going to go on last, and if they did, then would this mean the last match for The Undertaker? Well it looks that way.

As the match went back and forth, gradually Reigns had more control - the hinted at the Stone Cold heel turn (becoming a bad guy) vs The Rock at Wrestlemania 17 with chair shots to the grounded Undertaker and eventually Reigns pinned The Undertaker. Almost 27 years at the top in WWE over.

He took his hat, coat and gloves off and left them in the ring as he made one more walk up the entrance ramp. I wasn't emotional about it (in fact, I was bollocksed, I was on the train to Arsenal away at 10:20am and it was 5am the following morning by this point) but in the days since I've felt quite reflective that one of my first heroes has finally called it a day.

In footballing terms he's like the Buffon of wrestling; always reliable, been on top for decades and very much loved by those that respect everything they have achieved. They've been there through different eras of the sport but still maintain their popularity and relevance - probably a bigger achievement than any award, belt or cup.

Even if I fall out of love with wrestling again, I won't ever forget The Undertaker.

Cups and Quarters

I'm quite excited about tomorrow.

As we're approaching our 9th anniversary of being Moneybags City F.C. it would be quite easy to take a quarter final for granted. However, you don't have to go back too long into City's 123 years of existence to remember the days where we wouldn't get anywhere near the last 8 of a competition.

A midweek game against West Ham in March 2006 was our first quarter final for over a decade. I can remember the excitement, but not as much as I can recall the bitter misery when the Hammers, Dean Ashton in particular, wiped the floor with us. If we had won that we probably should have got to our first final in 25 years, but we didn't, and it was West Ham who became the forgotten team in the "Gerrard Final".

The disappointment continued 12 months later. Actually, I think the word "disappointment" would be more fitting for the League Cup quarters later in 2007 vs Spurs, when they, like West Ham in 2006 controlled the game and had a striker that looked head and shoulders above the rest - this time it was Berbatov.

No, it was closer to fury than disappointment 12 months after West Ham as we travelled to Ewood Park. The scene of one of the most joyous days this side of the millennium was the scene to one of the darkest days for City. The team were crap, the fans proper turned on the players and manager. In fact, I've written about this before here -> http://liamwright1987.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/2007-year-in-life.html and I don't want to think about it again. Well for awhile, anyway.

The next quarter was the roller coaster of Hamburg in the UEFA Cup. After being binned out of both domestic cups by Brighton and Forest, we clawed our way through 78 rounds of Thursday nights and teams with a "/" in their name. 1 up after 30 seconds by Stephen Ireland, we ended up getting hammered, luckily escaping with a 3-1 loss. Back at CoMS (as it was once known) we had a night famous for atmosphere and one of Elano's famous hours as we came back from being 1 down to 2-1 up and pressing right to the end. Wasn't to be though, but we were about to buy players like Barry, Tevez and Lescott who were going to turn us into serious contenders instead of also-rans.

I don't really remember the first quarter final I saw City win. We beat Arsenal 3-0 and I can see the goals go in but I have no real recollection of this apart from having a drink in Mary D's before the game. Maybe that's something to do with the memory loss. Through to the semi's vs United - less said about it all to be honest, apart from the home leg with Tevez calling Neville a phrase in Argentinian which translated to "sock sucker" or "boot licker".

The next year was one I do remember, although the game wasn't much to talk about. For all the money we spent and how we ruin young English players allegedly (especially Sterling, obviously) it was Micah Richards who headed the ball into the Reading net just over 6 years after a header away at Aston Villa had just started his fucking career. Sorry for swearing Garth. We knew before kick off that it was going to be United in the semi's for the second year in a row. This time the Deity of The Ivory Coast slipped the ball between Van Der Sar's legs as we Poznan'd ourselves to the final when Yaya "too lazy" Toure smashed the ball into the back of the net and City won our first trophy in 35 years. 35 years eh? The banner and many tears came down as the cup went up into the air from Tevez.

Probably the best one next as we beat Arsenal 1-0. I only watched about 20 minutes as the £10 tickets seemed to be an excuse to spend the £x I would normally spend at The Emirates on beer in the concourse. Great breakaway goal though and Aguero bagged. Think Razak played that night - remember him?! Liverpool followed the in the next round, we were really poor at home, should have won away - queues to get in a joke, but de Jong's slide tackle screamer goal was a moment.

The year after was a weird one. Mancini's time was coming to an end at City, the title was seemingly out of reach and we had an easy route to the final. Can't really remember much about the game, apart from hammering Barnsley and being on the whole rather intoxicated. Think I fell asleep in a pub that night. Semi win vs Chelsea was enjoyed, knowing we had Wigan in the final. Don't want to talk about the rest of it. You all know why.

Mancini replaced by Grandma Death himself Pellegrini. Mixed year in his first season, but two quarters to mention. Leicester away was a walk over, followed by hammering West Ham 9-0 over 2 legs. 1 down to Sunderland after about 10 minutes we then turned the game around in minutes as Yaya "get him out of our club" Toure scored the best goal Wembley has ever seen before Nasri scored an incredible volley. Navas finished off a great day winning the league cup for the first time since 1976. Also that year we rolled over for the second time in 12 months to Wigan as Uwe Rosler's men beat us the day before I flew off to Barcelona for the last 16 of the Champions League. Good old Uwe.

2014-15 was a bad year for City. Nothing to report in way of quarters.

Last season had two quarters as well. Hull at home was a walkover despite it being 1-0 for ages. The two legged affair at Everton was overall fun. The 3-1 win at home being a lot more enjoyable than the 2-1 away loss, especially when we were chasing the game and Pellers took off De Bruyne and brought on Fernando. I watched the highlights of the final last weekend. We hammered them, but somehow it all ended up going to penalties. Unlikely hero, William Cabby made a string of penalty saves before Yaya "he's finished" Toure scored the winning penalty. There's something about that chap and us winning things, isn't there? Perhaps if wasn't being asked at 33 to play 4 different positions at once by Pellegrini every week for 3 years then he wouldn't have slagged him off so much by large parts of our fanbase. Just a thought.

Then we had two memorable nights vs PSG in the Champions League. City finally stepped up to where we should have been a few years earlier considering the investment. Paris was a cracking trip, and I'm gutted we won't be able to play them again this season. Cup final apart, De Bruyne putting us 1 up away was the most our end went last season. Kevin scored against them again at the home leg ensuring our first ever semi final in the Champions League. Underwhelming might be the understatement, but I guess there's no shame in going out to the eventual winners - but to be honest we barely laid a glove on them.

Which leads us on to tomorrow against Boro, with Monaco soon to follow. Perhaps I'll have to update this in a few months with further tales of quarters, semi's and finals.

Txiki Swine

You know things aren’t all good when I’m piping up.

The season’s far from over, we’re two  points off 2^nd still in two cup competitions and although I cannot see us winning the title, we have come from 8 points behind with 6 games to go (have I mentioned that before?) to win the title against seasoned winners in Ferguson’s United.

However, there’s a lot that I’m frustrated with at City at the moment, and perhaps taking a pasting off Everton is the straw that broke the camels back.

We’ll get on to the main contributor in good time (guess who that might be). A few other issues:

Going to The Etihad. I tweeted soon after the Burnley game that it’s been some time since I last looked forward to going to the stadium and that apart from the Arsenal and Barcelona home games, there’s not been much positive about going to that place. It’s becoming somewhere I go between exiting and entering the door of one of the establishments on Oldham Street. Maybe it’s an age thing, but I remember loving being in the ground around 2011. Admittedly that could be with looking back with rose tinted specs on too. The atmosphere just isn’t the same anymore, and I don’t mean “the noise we create”, I think after the initial rush of the football being back faded after a few games, people are just going through the motions for being at the game. I do it, you do it. Maybe the rush went, but coincidentally this was at a time where the standard of football started going to rat shit.

The football is very smart between the two centre halves and goalkeeper, but I’d struggle to think of many times where we’ve dragged their team out of position by playing pass the parcel in our area and then hit the opposition on the counter attack to create a goal scoring opportunity. Aguero looks like the only player in the squad capable of scoring more than 15 goals a season. Only three years ago we had 4 players who scored more than this, and if Jovetic hadn’t been injured for large portions of the season then I’m sure he would have scored a lot more.

There’s loads of issues all over the pitch though. Full backs – 3 out of the 4 have been at the club for 6 years and the lot of them are over 30. Reliance on Kompany being fit (here’s a clue – he isn’t ever fit). Stones and Otamendi incapable of playing together. Aguero and Fernandinho discipline – 5 bans between 2 players, Fernandinho having been sent off 3 times in his last 6 games in all comps. No one else can play like Fernandinho either. I love Toure but it says a lot that we’ve had to turn to him, when most fans claimed that we had out grown him. Silva and de Bruyne can look incredible at times, ineffectual other times. Sterling shows glimpses of being a world beater but he doesn’t do the things he’s good at enough i.e. tough game away at Hull with 10 men behind the ball. He runs at a defender to create space and his skill and pace wins us a penalty – this skill and pace could be the difference every week. With that in mind, Sane needs to have a proper run in the team. Kelechi gone backwards. Doesn’t seem to want to trust in Nolito.

We spent close to £30m on a Brazilian wonderkid who apparently can’t get all his documents sorted – only at City.

And then there’s the fucking goal keeper. Take away the view that Joe Hart’s never coming back, and take away the view that Bravo plays the way our manager wants. We have let Charles Joseph Hart, City and England’s number 1 leave the club and replace him by a guy who poses no threat to the opposition at corners, someone who doesn’t seem to be any quicker at shifting the ball with his hands than Hart did, and more important than anything CANNOT STOP THE BALL FROM GOING IN THE NET. I’m not one of these who lays into Stones as he’s a footballer playing in defence, however, your goalkeeper should be winning you points. I don’t want to kick Bravo when he’s down, and he’s certainly not being helped by the attacking players who are not taking their opportunities, but the guy is just not suited to playing in the Premier League. He brings a nervousness to an on-edge centre half pairing and you never see the guy screaming out instructions, which would be helpful for a team devoid of organisation and leadership. You know, all the attributes of Joe Hart.

I’ve said before that Joe Hart isn’t exactly my cup of tea off the pitch before; when I’m drinking Guinness in The Temple putting something of Revolver on the jukebox, he’s having Jagerbomb’s in Tiger Tiger jumping round to Calvin Harris. But that doesn’t stop him from being a legend of Manchester City. If there was a Mount Rushmore of City players in this current era, the most successful era of the clubs history there’s no doubt that his face would be on it. At the beginning of the summer 2016 I said there were only 3 players for me which were untouchable this summer: de Bruyne, Aguero and Hart. Since Pellegrini dropped him in Autumn 2013 he came back and became the most consistent performer for the club for over 2 years. Yeah Aguero scored a lot of goals and de Bruyne had a great first season, but Hart for a substantial period of time became our most consistent performer. Fuck me, anyone reading this will know exactly what I mean when you think about that Barcelona away game.

So we shift him on to Torino. Torino? Yeah, Torino.

And did you know that Samir Nasri, you know the guy who helped us win two titles and had the knack of scoring some of the more important goals for City, was allowed to go on loan to Seville for a year with a £16m buy clause.

At work a few months ago we had a coffee machine come back from a customer. A really great coffee solution for an office, which, brand new including installation would set you back somewhere between £6-6,500. On our books, a 2^nd hand machine registers as about £1,300 as a cost price. Now, I’m not the greatest salesperson in the world, but I sold that machine for £3,600. I was happy that I got £2,300 profit on the machine, and this guy was buzzing that he got a machine not new for almost half the price.

Why am I telling you about sales and my job in particular? Because I’m telling you right now, Txiki Begiristain would have sold that machine for £1,500. I would love to see Txiki do my job for a month and to see how far off his target he’d be. I don’t do any buying, but I realise what the value is in an asset. If I tried to sell that machine for less than £2k then as far as I’m concerned I’d be telling that customer that what you are trying to purchase is a load of shit and it’s used so much that it’s barely above scrapping all together.

I don’t know how everything works at City but as a guess, Txiki looks at the amortisation of a player regarding FFP and looks at what we price we could do it at. Now you look at Chelsea. They’ve sold Oscar for £52m, I realise that Oscar has 4 years on Nasri but as far as ability goes, is Oscar over three times the player Nasri is? Of course not. But the difference is they value their players. Safe to say that the day that Mangala is no longer associated with the club the media and fans from all over the world will piss their sides at the frighteningly bad scouting that went into discovering him and the ridiculous discrepancy between the money we spent on him and the amount he will be leaving the club for. Tell you what, I remember watching City hammer Porto at home in 2012 with David Pizzarro in midfield and they had Otamendi, Mangala and Fernando in their team that day. I’ll leave you to think about that for a minute.

I remember writing once about the “ghosts” of certain players. The ghosts of Joleon Lescott, Gareth Barry, Nigel de Jong, Carlos Tevez, Mario Balotelli, Edin Dzeko and dare I even say it Adam Johnson hang over this current crop and are forever growing as they would all chip in with match winning performances, goals or generally be that difference between winning titles and struggling to get in the top 4, like we are right now. None of these players have been sufficiently replaced. Only Fernandinho and Kevin de Bruyne can be referred to as success’ since the day we signed Aguero in July 2011. That’s almost 6 years. I’m hoping in 3 years I’ll be adding Sane, Sterling, Jesus and Stones to this list as well as many others, but why should I believe in a director of football who has so little to show since he walked through the door?

Txiki has overseen this clusterfuck. I’m getting bored of mentioning Martin Tyler speculating about how the happenings of 13^th May 2012 could be the start of a dynasty.

His defence will always be fire fighting the FFP issues laid before him by Garry Cook, and he got Pep to manage the club. People will probably let him get away with it all due to these reasons, after all, David Cameron got in again by finger pointing the previous regime for any problems, and some people are so besotted with Guardiola that he could call Kinkladze an overrated fat Russian and no one would blink an eye.

No doubt if we win the Champions League and Guardiola super kicks Mourinho in the FA Cup final just after Gabriel Jesus scores an overhead kick then all of the above will be irrelevant. But I’m more sure in 10 months time we’ll be back to where we are now. Potless, squandered loads of money on unproven players, Joe Hart captaining Liverpool and kept 7 clean sheets in 9 games and Bravo playing upfront.