Singing the Blues (again) and why FFP has nothing to do with fairness

The god that is Vincent lifts the trophy

The domestic football season is almost over, but oh my goodness, what a season it’s been!

More open than any for years, with three teams in with a chance of claiming the Premier League title until only a matter of days before the concluding round of matches.

As a City fan of 40 years (this year!) and counting – I am, of course, utterly delighted: not just with a second title in two years, but a first ever double, having lifted the League Cup in March.

And I got to be there on both occasions and I screamed myself daft – great catharsis – and I’m still feeling the sheer joy. Hey – that’s football for you.

Fortunately too, for health reasons, the final day of the season wasn’t as nerve-shreddingly tense as 2012.

The season was not just about City, though.

Goodness – how I wish I was a betting person and had thought to put money on a Madrid derby for the Champion’s League final.

And no look back at the domestic season would be complete without recognition of David Moyes’s achievement in finally getting Everton above Manchester United in the table.

 Chris Hughton

It was also good to see Arsenal win the FA Cup – not because I have any sort of issue with Hull or Steve Bruce (in my days as a pro sports hackette, I interviewed him, and he’s a decent bloke), but because it helped stuff some of his words back down José Mourinho’s over-sized gob.

Banter is one thing – the utter lack of respect he shows on a regular basis is quite another. And as for his “19th century football”, I’m no fan of Allardici’s style, but Chelsea can hardly claim to be an unrelenting a joy on the eye.

On the subject of respect and talking to managers, I would like to take this opportunity to apologise to all those I seem to have jinxed this term by taking their pictures.

After photographing an event at Westminster for Show Racism the Red Card early last December, Steve Lomas and Chris Hughton have lost their jobs, while Alan Pardew seemed to go into meltdown a short while later.

West Ham fans may – or may not – be interested to know that I also photographed Sam Allardyce.

I should add that, as far as that evening was concerned, all were completely charming, as were all the people I came into contact with.

Ashton-under-Lyne's very own Gordon Taylor

And a special mention for PFA boss Gordon Taylor. Back when I was a sports ed, he’d give me the time of the day and would take my calls, yet I’d never met him face to face. It was a pleasure.

Of course the season also ended with news of UEFA’s sanctions against those European clubs judged to have fallen foul of the new financial fair play (FFP) rules.

The two biggest clubs affected were City and Paris St-Germain – champions in their respective countries for this term just gone.

Now it is, I should point out, entirely coincidental that both clubs are currently owned by swarthy Middle Eastern types. After all, UEFA has frequently illustrated just how seriously it treats racism rearing its ugly head anywhere near the beautiful game.

Indeed, only last February, it fined Atletico Madrid €10,000 euros (£8,270) and ordered a partial stadium closure after fans racially abused Manchester City youth players in a match.

Comparisons with UEFA’s €100,000 fine and a one-match ban for Nicklas Bendtner in 2012, after he sported sponsored undies, are fundamentally flawed.

Steve Lomas, Sir Trevor Brooking and Sam Allardyce

After all: that was about money. Or more importantly, about not upsetting big business when it sponsors the game.

Now the thing about FFP, in theory at least, is that it’s supposed to avoid any more cases of clubs living so far beyond their means that they go bust as a result.

Which is a perfectly laudable aim.

However, neither City nor PSG are living above their means.

You can object all you like to those clubs being owned by foreigners, to those foreigners being Middle Eastern, to owners being richer than Croesus, to the state of football in general or to the moon being made out of cheese, but it doesn’t change the simple fact that the owners of those clubs are wealthy enough that they’re not likely to go broke any time soon, no matter how much they spend, and certainly not as long as the oil is flowing.

Rachel Yankey

Indeed, in City’s case, the entire Etihad Campus project is seeing a massive regeneration of an area of Manchester that has been derelict since the massive deindustrialisation of the 1980s – and not just with facilities for the club, but also for local people, including housing.

And – hardly unimportant – a shed-load of new jobs, with a commitment that close to 100% will go to local people.

All that's without mentioning that it represents a long-term, sustainable model for the club, by creating a world-class academy along the lines of that at Barcelona.

None of this suggests that Sheikh Mansour is about to pull the plug and run away, leaving the club to die because he’s got bored.

The problem with FFP – and casting aside cynicism for a moment, let’s just say that it really was meant to stop another Portsmouth – what it actually does is go a long way to closing the door between an existing European elite and those who might aspire to join it.

It’s a little like the UK and US rabbiting on about protectionist policies – after using the very same approach to initially build their own economies.

Alan Pardew surprises SRTRC’s own Ged Grebby

In terms of domestic UK football, there is not a single winner of the English title for a considerable length of time that has not had to buy players.

If you want to talk of ‘buying titles’, then Blackburn and Jack Walker are a perfect example.

Manchester United and Chelsea have spent considerable sums – as have Liverpool – including on wages (infographic here that might surprise you).

After the ‘golden generation’ of Fergie’s Fledglings, United have frequently brought new talent to the club – and broken the British transfer record in so doing.

And then there’s the idea that Arsenal don’t spend money – that they ‘do it right’ – a rather romantic perception that is actually rubbished by looking at the facts.

Having won the title in 1988-89 and 1990-91 under George Graham, the Gunners then endured a bit of a drought.

Arsène Wenger took over the managerial hot seat in 1996 after the 14-month reign of Bruce Rioch had been followed by the brief caretakerships of Stewart Houston and Pat Rice.

Speaker John Bercow, Rachel Yankey and Gordon Taylor

The previous year, under Rioch, the club had made the marquee signing of Denis Bergkamp for £7.5m. The following year, Patrick Vieira was brought in for £3.5m, and in 1997, Emmanuel Petit joined for £2.5m and Marc Overmars for £5.5.

Adjusting for inflation, that’s £12,581,338.70 for Bergkamp, £5,733,350.00 for Vieira, £3,972,000.00 for Petit and £8,738,400.00 for Overmars.

In 1995, the English record transfer fee was £7m – paid by Manchester United to Newcastle for Andy Cole – until that Bergkamp deal.

Arsenal went on to win the title in 1997-98, 2001-02 and 2003-04. They continued to be both a buying and a selling club in that period, including, in 1999, spending a new club record of £11m to bring Thierry Henry to north London from Juve.

A list of British tranfer records makes for interesting reading, although it’s far from complete.

It doesn’t, for instance, mention the £42m deal that brought Mesut Özil to Arsenal last summer – not least because the British record has been smashed out of sight by the fees paid to English clubs by Real for, first, Ronaldo and then Gareth Bale.

By 2000, Barça were willing to stump up £32m for Overmars and Petit combined, a week after Luis Figo had left the club for Real for £37.2m. At the time, other top fees in global terms were Hernan Crespo – Parma to Lazio for £36m – and Christian Vieri – £31m to move to  Inter from Lazio.

Those figures also illustrate just where the market was pushing up transfer fees most.

Now none of this is intended as a ‘dig’ at any club.

But it shows quite clearly that the reality is that no club that challenges for domestic titles in the UK – let alone wishes to challenge in European competition – is likely to do so without substantial spending.

It also illustrates one reason why Arsenal have failed to win another title for some years.

If one really wanted to look at financial issues, perhaps one should ask why UEFA has managed not a whisper as a club such as Manchester United was bought in a way that places it in greater risk.

One could, if one were so inclined, consider the role of agents in creating transfer inflation.

My solution to that would – in UK terms at least – to have PFA-appointed reps available to help any player needing help with any form of contract negotiations.

It would go a long way to cutting out the culture of agents shit stirring to make money for themselves off the back of the talents of any players in their stables.

But since that seems unlikely to happen in the near future, remember this: spending money that you have is worth a £50m fine.

Abusing young, black players because of the colour of their skins comes in at £8,270.

Find out more here about Show Racism the Red Card

Never felt more like singin' the Blues

Vincent and the boys enjoy the win

Three days down the line and I’m still singin’ the Blues – the Blues in question being Manchester City, who triumphed in the League Cup final (or the Capital One Cup Final if you insist on the sponsored version) at Wembley on Sunday afternoon.

Yes, I know that it was ‘only’ Sunderland (which is massively unfair on them), but it was a match taken seriously by both teams and by both sets of fans and which, for those reasons alone, brought prestige back to a competition that, in recent years, has suffered because some clubs have treated it as a sideshow to the main events of the title and the FA Cup.

We last won it in 1976 – 2-1 against another North East team, Newcastle, with goals from Peter Barnes and a memorable overhead kick from Denis Tueart: I still have the press cuttings in a scrapbook.

That was a victory that marked the end of the good times, though, followed as it was by a silverware drought that lasted until the FA Cup final of 2011.

With last season’s FA Cup final defeat by Wigan all too fresh in the memory, the Black Cats’ goal on 10 minutes did nothing to soothe nerves.

It’s a good thing that I have short hair because otherwise I’d have been tearing it out for an hour.

‘No, no, no – not again! Please no!’

I arrived in good time and took my time wandering up Wembley Way, sampling the atmosphere. No silly jester hat this time – it was probably why we lost in May.

Superstition plays a role on such days: coffee in my ‘City ’til I die’ match day mug first thing in the morning is an established ritual.

Up in the gods to watch the gods

This time, with yet more rain promised and greyness already evident, I attired myself in navy cords, a hooded sweatshirt and a home shirt (Zabaleta on the back). This is not a particularly fetching look for anyone of my shape, but since I was determined to wear colours and since I’d already tried the shirt underneath a hooded sweatshirt look for the Barcelona game (which we lost) I wasn’t repeating that mistake.

Then for the City dog tags, the earring and the two rings – one of which, a 1970s enamel crest on a stainless steel band – was given to me as a Christmas present by friends at Fairfield High School for Girls, which just happens to be up the road from where the current stadium is.

That one has enormous sentimental value – I refused an offer of a tenner for it some years ago, when a tenner would have been very welcome – and only comes out for the really, really big games.

A baseball cap (Champions’ League) topped off the ensemble – as I said, no wearing that blue and white jester hat again – together with a Capital One Cup Final scarf that I’d picked up at the Etihad a couple of weeks ago, since it was cheaper than anything that the stalls on Wembley Way could offer.

The atmosphere was brilliant – none of the pessimism and doubt that City fans were feeling last May even before we made it into the stadium.

The only real question on people’s lips was whether Manuel Pellegrini was right to opt for Costel Pantilimon in goal rather than Joe Hart – a slightly odd thing to be asking when Roberto Mancini’s dropping of Pants on the morning of the Cup Final (and then sending one of the junior coaching staff to tell him) had almost certainly been one factor in what happened that day.

If you’re going to operate a squad – and with so many matches in so many competitions in a single season, you have to – then you don’t drop players when they’ve got you to a final.

Anyway, once inside the stadium, a pint of Tetleys was slowly imbibed while gazing outside.

At one point, a Virgin Pendolino sped past in the near distance, on its way north. It reminded me of all those trips I’d made in that direction, glancing to the right as we passed Wembley and uttering a silent prayer that I’d eventually get a chance to see City play there in a final for a proper trophy.

Mike Doyle with the League Cup in 1976

And here I was, on a third visit to the stadium in four years – the second for an actual final.

But however much this is a new incarnation of the Blues, the history remains.

In the fourth minute, in honour of former skipper Mike Doyle, who lifted that last League Cup in ’76, fans stood to applaud the man who died in 2011.

And nicely done by Wembley for putting up a picture of him on the big screens too.

Then, at the end, as I was leaving, people were taking it in turns to ring a very special bell outside.

Helen ‘The Bell’ Turner was a lifelong City fan who sold flowers outside Manchester Royal Infirmary, raised loads of money for charity, and carried a school bell with her to all games, where she rang it with a vengeance.

She stood behind the goal and would chat with ’keeper Joe Corrigan, giving him a sprig of heather before each match.

She was so much a part of the club that she ‘rang out’ the final game at Maine Road and, when she died in 2005, there was a minute’s silence for her.

And back on that League Cup Final day in 1976, memorable pictures attest to her joining the team on their lap of honour with the trophy.

Mike and Helen – just two indicators of how City has ‘no history’, according to some who resent our recent change in fortunes.

Anyway, back to the present – or the rather more recent past, as it is now.

Sunderland’s goal – well taken by Fabio Borini – came six minutes after that tribute, and I spent the following 60 minutes in hair-tearing mode, screaming at the team (and occasionally the ref) and frequently with palms pressed to brow in anguish.

Asa Hartford and Helen the Bell with the trophy in '76

Logic stated that, unlike last season’s FA Cup Final, the opposition had scored early and time was on our side, but logic and emotion are not necessarily the best of bedfellows.

Everything changed, though, inside two second-half minutes.

The Engineer claims not to have said much more at half time than ‘stay calm and patient’, but his charges came out a different team.

And 10 minutes into the second stanza, up stepped Yaya Touré to curl home a miracle shot (at my end of the pitch) from all of 30 yards out.

Then, just a minute later, Samir Nasri gave us the lead with another spectacular strike.

Not, of course, that it was ever going to be comfortable.

Moments of looking fragile at the back were only finally put to bed when Jesús Navas made it 3-1 on 90 minutes.

What a friend we have in Jesús.

Especially on a Sunday.

Now the celebrations could really begin.

Oh, the joy of seeing Vincent Kompany lift a pot at Wembley!

Most of the Sunderland fans stayed for the presentation and afterwards, as we were all slowly trooping out of the stadium, we applauded them and they applauded us.

They’re fantastic fans and helped create a really marvellous atmosphere: a credit to their club and their city.

Not that you’d have got that impression the night before from Tory MP Robert Halfon, who tweeted in disgust that they’d ‘taken over’ Covent Garden and turned it into a “cesspit”.

How dare those dreadful northern oiks come down to the Big Smoke to wreck your night out, eh Bobby?

The public-school educated politician has since apologised for calling Sunderland fans “scumbags”. He, however, remains a plonker.

I joined friends for a spot of post-match partying – although, in ridiculously middle-aged style, I was still home by 9.30pm.

It had been another day of sharp emotions: of dramatic highs and crazy lows.

But goodness: after all the years where what we mostly worried about was whether we could avoid relegation – and goodness, I shed a tear or two in those times – and where, more than once, we rescued defeat from the jaws of victory, how wonderful to be there, at Wembley, to see the Blues lift a serious trophy once again.

And on Wednesday night, I’m pleased to report that my voice has recovered.

Well ... almost.

Taking the imagination for a walk

Redgreen and Violet-Yellow Rhythms

The Tate Modern’s exhibition on Paul Klee: Making Visible might not quite be exhaustive, but exhausting it most certainly is.

Laid out in 17 rooms – some large, some small with only four or five pictures – it takes a serious investment of time to visit.

As a neighbour of ours, having visited with his partner, who is herself an artist, commented with a note of weariness: “There are a lot of paintings”.

A great deal of Klee’s work is also on small canvases, so require you to get up close and use a little more attention.

By the time we reached the final rooms, visitors were scurrying past us having clearly had enough.

Battle Scene from the Comic-Fantastic Opera 'The Seafarer'

That being said, it’s an exhibition that offers plenty of rewards – not least in providing such an extensive selection of his work, from 1912 to his premature death in 1940.

In the later part of that career, Klee – a Swiss German – was among the many artists who were damned by the Nazis as ‘degenerate’.

Yet for all Hitler’s hatred of anything beyond the most traditional painting, Klee’s work has a timeless quality that can make it feel as ancient as it is modern, and most definitely has something of folk art about it.

Blue Night

There is a playfulness on occasion and an apparently naïve joy about some of the works that is reminiscent of Chagall.

Yet there’s also plenty here to illustrate Klee’s seriousness – not least in his explorations of colour.

The gradation paintings are themselves fascinating and very beautiful and however muted some of his palette may appear to be, there is a depth of colour here that is vibrant and has great warmth.

Fish Magic

The experimentation extends beyond colour to the media used, including what was painted on, how it was primed – and also how the works are displayed.

In some cases, Klee made his own mounts and frames, thus ensuring that the works take on a sense of having greater dimension and of being artistic objects rather than simply being flat pictures.

Personally, I was coming to Klee with little more than a spot of book-learned knowledge, but found myself drawn in to some of the works in particular.

Walpurgis Night

Redgreen and Violet-Yellow Rhythms from

1920 is the exhibition poster piece, and this apparently simple oil painting of geometric blocks of colour, dotted with trees, is a perfect example of the attraction.

Perhaps it’s the Christmassyness of the green and red, but getting lost in it conjures, for me, a sense of a northern winter: of dark, starry nights and snowy terrain and forests.

But this sort of thing was a repeat theme.

In Walpurgis Night, a gouache from 1935, the faces of creatures and witches look out from behind the moody blue wood.

Bewitched-Petrified

Here we are again – into the realm of the forest in the German psyche. It has a thrilling, slightly scary feel about it, and a sense of fairy tales, something that comes through in a number of works.

Bewitched-Petrified (watercolour on plywood, 1934) is another with the sense of folk/fairy tales and the forest.

Fish Magic (oil and watercolour on canvas, 1925) is one of the larger pieces, and seems to have an inner glow, as though it’s partly stained glass, lit from behind.

Blue Night (1937) is a lovely, soothing use of colour and shape – no matter how apparently loosely sketched the latter is in this instance.

It’s also a good illustration of what I mentioned earlier about media. In this case, it’s a “pastel on cotton on coloured paste on burlap; original frame”.

The Path into the Blue

The Path into the Blue (1934) appealed too: again, it’s a simplicity that allows the imagination full rein.

Oh, and it’s got a blue moon in it, which had The Other Half rolling his eyes as I (quietly) burst into the opening refrain of Manchester City’s anthem.

Of the more abstract works, I also liked The Invention (watercolour on cotton on plywood, 1934) and, quite differently, The Other Half particularly liked Still Life with Crucifers (oil on linen on cardboard, 1925).

Still life with Crucifers

Of the fantastical and the fairy tale, Battle Scene from the Comic-Fantastic Opera ‘The Seafarer’ (oil, graphite, watercolour and gouache on paper, bordered with watercolour, ink and gouache on cardboard, 1923) has it by the bucketload.

Comedy (watercolour and oil transfer drawing on paper, 1921) is just one more example of many with a playful and yet strange quality about it.

It was Klee himself who said that drawing was “taking a line for a walk”.

The Tate’s exhibition, which is on until March, offers a pefect opportunity to take the eyes for a walk and let the imagination run wild.

Just don’t expect to see it in anything less than an hour and a half.

Tate Modern

Gary Owen put his arm around my shoulder

Gary Owen and me. Maine Road, 1979

I used to love this time of year – I mean, I don’t hate it now, but I used to really love it: perhaps more than any other. The end of August and the start of September brought with it the start of the football season and the start of the school.

Add to that that harvest was always my favourite time in the religious calendar (closet pagan that I obviously was).

But in terms of the new term, that was not because I was some sort of dreadful swot – I wasn’t – but in essence, because by the end of six weeks, I was simply lonely.

Mossley was wonderful in many, many ways, but when we moved there, fellow pupils at my new primary school had already had four years to establish friendships - many of which would already have been formed before they even started school - and when I went to Fairfield, I was the only one from that same primary school, it was two bus rides away and I lived nowhere near nobody anyone in my class.

And in footballing terms, for many years, close seasons were also a quiet time.

Manchester City, so often a laughing stock during a season, were rarely worth much gossip outside of it.

It has been part of the strange new world of winning football’s lottery that we’re now rarely out of the media, whether it’s genuine news about the club, speculation masquerading as news or just gossip.

The last of which brings to mind a very northern vision of gossip - and one that, in theory, I'm far too young to have: Norman Evans doing 'over the garden wall'.

Okay, so Les Dawson didn't invent it, but Evans, a comic right from the music hall tradition, should be way beyond my own memories. He is - but like many who grew up with parents who had lived through the war, the cultural memories were handed down just as much as the stories of, in my immediate family's case, the bombing of Liverpool and Plymouth.

I could mimic Evans before I eventually saw footage of him.

Mine, I think, was a generation caught between worlds: that of the pre-war, in which my parents grew up, and then the sixties and seventies, in which we grew up. A muddled collision of two very different worlds, split by such a short time historically, yet changed out of all recognition by the events that took place within that timeframe.

I offer a single, but very different cultural illustration.

City even invaded my art studies. Niall Quinn

Take Hollywood. Take The Maltese Falcon from 1941. And then take The Big Sleep from 1946. Just five years divide them, yet one remains modern and the other seems dated. They seems to be worlds apart.

My parents, like many others, I'm sure, struggled with these changes – certainly with the moral/ethical ones.

In many ways, I've long felt that I was brought up in a sort of time bubble: it was often really rather 1930s.

My father used to quite openly declare that he wanted a son, but that as a tomboy, I was the next best thing.

When it came to football, I discovered and adopted it all on my own and in spite of my earliest memories of the game, where my father was screaming at the TV set while England were playing (particularly against West Germany).

Rather perversely, although he had – and still essentially has – a very conservative attitude toward women, he seemed to welcome my interest, and bought me football cards and comics, albeit drawing the line at actually taking me to any matches.

My mother, herself every bit as much a traditionalist in terms of what a woman’s role should be – and arguably more so – remains a cricket and Rugby League fan. But somehow football was beyond that – not least as I tried to play at every possible opportunity.

For some years, I was only allowed to go and watch Mossley AFC – the realisation dawned years later that my father had his personal Stasi on duty wherever I went (or parishioners, as they’re sometimes known) and besides, Seal Park was only just behind our house.

In those lonely summer holidays, I’d spend hours bashing a ball against the garage door, lost in a world where I was scoring the winning goal in the FA Cup Final, until my distracted mother would come out and tell me to stop making such a noise.

Mind, come Wimbledon, I’d thrash a tennis ball against a wall and imagine victory in south London.

I was, in other words, sportily inclined, and also somewhat competitive.

For all the attempts to bring me up as a delicate and refined example of the female species, my genes seemed to scream something rather different.

Eventually, in 1979, I was permitted to go to A Real Match.

My parents had taken me to cricket at the real Old Trafford – I have seen Gary Sobers play – but much as I liked and still do like cricket, it made no odds to my blossoming love of the round-ball game, and I had continued to nag.

The Real Match in question was a rearranged fixture at the end of the 1979 season. In other words, it was one of the last opportunities for me to go to Maine Road before we were due to move away from the area.

In retrospect, I rather think this impending move featured in parental calculations.

Since it was rearranged, it took place in midweek. I went with Dorothy Edwards, whose own parents allowed her to go on a regular basis. My envy knew no bounds.

We got there early. My school tie was slightly pulled down – the very limits of rebellious behaviour for me at the time – and I had my school bag slung around me. The photographs make me look far younger (to my middle-aged eyes) than the 16 and a half that I actually was.

With Kaziu Deyna at Maine Road, 1979

I bought a few postcard photos of some of the team in the club shop (a portacabin) and then we went to wait outside the players’ carpark. There, I got several of the pictures autographed, and Dorothy took two photographs of me with players: Kazimierz Deyna and Gary Owen.

Deyna was the Polish World Cup captain at the time and a quality midfield player. Because of injury, he only made 38 appearances for City, scoring 12 goals. I saw two of them that night – even though we lost 3-2 to visitors Aston Villa.

Owen was one of our homegrown young stars. He was also the only player that I ever had a crush on – my footballing priorities were never about sex.

I look gauche as all hell on the pictures. In one sense, I hate them. But I also love them too, because in this very new world for Manchester City fans, they're evidence that I am not a bandwagon jumper.

More evidence can be found in a ring I still have – a Christmas present from Fairfield friends Susan Prince and, I think, Kay Grimshaw. It was a typical 1970s stainless still job, with an enamelled crest on top.

Some years ago, I was travelling north to a game and was offered a tenner for it by a fellow passenger. No way. Even if I was broke, that's a sentimental item I’d hate to be parted from.

It was also on a finger the day we won the title in May 2012. It was on my hand again last Sunday, when we handed out a serious thrashing to Manchester United that left me, once again, without much of a voice. Four goals = four screams = half a voice left.

Oh City, City, City: how can I explain my love for you? A love that has, over the years, been so often tested by the most dismal performances; by an unparalleled ability to grasp defeat from the jaws of victory; by off-pitch shenanigans; by farce masquerading as tragedy.

I recall a midweek League Cup game at Anfield when we lost 6-0, followed by a Saturday league match at Maine Road, just days later and also against Liverpool, when we lost 4-0.

“Alan Ball’s a football genius!” we sang at the then coach, who eventually emerged from the dug out to rather drily applaud.

And “We’ll score again, don’t know where, don’t know when, but I know we’ll score again some sunny day.”

Or at Bramall Lane for a fixture against Sheffield United, with the Blades fans chanting: “We hate Wednesday, we hate Wednesday,” to which our retort was: “We hate Saturday, we hate Saturday”.

Yet in May 1999, I came away from Wembley in the full and certain knowledge that that afternoon’s win against Gillingham in the Division II play-off final had been one of the greatest days in my life.

A word here, though, for the Gills fans, who were superb that day and well into a somewhat drunken evening.

And that’s without going over the story of 13 May 2012 when we won the title in extra time, in the kost dramatic fashion possible, and were crowned England’s champions for the first time in 44 years.

Another sketch. Tony Coton this time

In a nomadic life, City has, since I was around 13 or 14, remained a constant. Often a constant misery, a constant disappointment – but a constant nonetheless.

And these days, it is no longer quite like that.

On Sunday, I took the train to Manchester for the game against Salford United.

I was the first home game this season that I could get to.

And it was a wonder. If the 6-1 at The Swamp two years ago is already legend, this may well end up being even more so. Because while that certainly owed something to flukishness, with one of their side sent off with almost half the game to go, and many of our goals coming on the counter, this did not.

At 4-1, the scoreline might not have seemed as dramatic, but the performance was arguably much more so.

It was sandwiched between a Champions’ League away win in the Czech Republic (3-0) and a 5-0 drubbing of Wigan, who, only a few months ago, were much the better team on the day when they beat us 1-0 in the FA Cup Final at Wembley.

I’m no mathematician, but three games, 12 goals for and just one against is looking pretty good. The big, BIG test will come next week, when we face reigning champions Bayern München in the Champions’ League.

But hell – we’re IN the Champions’ League! And that is sort of match we all dreamed of for years.

We might have started the season in an mixed fashion, as new coach Manuel Pellegrini got his feet properly under the table and then faced some crucial injuries, but in the last week, we seem to have been on fire.

The Engineer is doing well: with Kompany and Nastasic back, central defence is solid, meaning that Yaya Touré can move further forward.

Indeed, Pellegrini’s decision to switch Yaya with Fernandinho, leaving the Brazilian further back, looked superb on Sunday.

Kolarov, who is unquestionably good in attack, even looked the part in defence at the weekend, and Clichy is now fit again.

Džeko is looking revitalised by a coach who, by all accounts, doesn’t work on the basis of hairdryers, grand funks, not talking to anyone or only talking to the press.

Oh, and before you think otherwise, I still love Roberto, but just understand that he had taken us as far as he could.

Football – I love you. Even though I wasn’t supposed to.

And City: one of the few constants in my life, I love you too. It may not be the case, but I do suspect that, if you cut me, I’d bleed blue.

And there’s very little that could better the catharsis of that day in May 2012. Or last Sunday.