You know things aren’t all good when I’m piping up.
The season’s far from over, we’re two points off 2nd
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 2nd 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 13th
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.
