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.

The end of an era

And so it seems, Bobby Manc is no more.

No more the insouciant flick of the sliver-ash-blond locks with the manicured hands.

No more the great question of the fruit pastilles: were Brian and David allowed the black ones, Roberto, or not?

Mass before big matches and elegies to departed popes at press conferences …

The scarf: traditional but worn with Italian flair to go with those immaculate suits.

Oh dear.

As if Saturday’s Cup Final wasn’t bad enough, now Manchester City have gone and sacked coach Roberto Mancini in what could best be described as a ‘tactless’ manner.

Just so we get this clear – I’m gutted. I love Bobby Manc.

I love him, quite simply, because he has been the one who has been the coach when my beloved Blues (supported for nearly 40 years – eek!) have finally remembered how to win.

I will love him for ever for last year’s title win alone: the sheer drama of it, agony to ecstasy in three minutes flat, will never leave me.

For goodness sake – there’s a Mancini bobblehead on a shelf in the study (where all my kitschest things live).

Look, I admit it: City is the one major area in my life where I can get a bit irrational. By the very nature of our fandom, we are emotional and generally predisposed to irrationality.

But what I want to do here is to try to change that and to be more rational.

It’s not easy: we don’t know the full facts – and probably never will – and there’s an element of piecing together a jigsaw from a box that is only partly full and has no picture of what the finished puzzle should look like.

But let’s give it a whirl.

The media talk has, for some months, concentrated on the poor showing in this season’s Champions’ League.

In the later stages of the season, that has been compounded by the inability to defend the Premier League title, and then by Saturday’s defeat.

Some of this has been over the top.

There have been problems this season that we were fortunate enough not to have last term: injuries, for one.

The defence has remained sound and we’ve continued to dominate games – the key issue has been an inability to convert chances into goals this time around.

It wasn’t helped when, 10 minutes into the season, Sergio Aguero was injured and subsequently played no part for a month, then struggled to find form.

Mario Balotelli was out at the same time with eye problems. He never found form on his return and, as everyone knows, left in January. Edin Džeko is another who has found consistency hard to come by.

Under those circumstances, a second-place finish is hardly a disaster – although we fans probably have slightly different expectations and agendas than the owners.

But the club’s own statement on the sacking of Mancini included a very interesting word: “holistic”.

It seems that his relationships with the players have been poor – we know that there have been rows. Last season there was, of course, the entire debacle over Carlos Tevez.

This season, with Joe Hart, with Samir Nasri, with Balotelli (of course) and even – and perhaps this was the most shocking – with Vincent Kompany.

And those are the ones we know about.

Now the ‘hairdryer’ approach, as it might be called, can pay dividends – it has for a certain Scot – but if you never balance that with something rather less aggressive, it’s easy to see that there could be problems.

Indeed, I’d also suggest that, while we as fans might find some of this incredibly entertaining, it’s probably not particularly fun if you’re a player or a member of staff who is on the receiving end of such things.

There is an argument, indeed, that it amounts to workplace bullying, for which there should be no place – and it doesn’t suddenly become acceptable or easy to live with or something you should simply ‘put up with’ if you’re earning over X amount or simply because you’re a footballer and not a hospital cleaner.

For clarity, I don’t think City have an issue with ‘player power’ in the sense that it’s generally understood, although I continue to maintain that background issues may have been, in part, what was behind Saturday’s poor performance.

But let’s explore further.

Given Mancini’s rants about Brian Marwood and last summer’s transfer business, and then the weekend’s lambasting of the club for not dealing with the rumours of his own departure, it’s possible to conclude that that combustible approach to man management might also have been carried over into his relationships with club executives, if not the owners themselves.

Next up, is the issue of the club’s academy. If our long-term future is not totally dependent on developing our own players, it will certainly be very important – not least because of rules on spending.

The suggestion is that Mancini has not been interested in this part of the club’s development.

Again, this is something we have to take partly on trust, although the dearth of young players coming into the first team over the last three years (beyond his initial enthusiasm for Dedryck Boyata) may indicate a truth to this point – particularly as we have many potentially good young players at the club.

But finally, I want to dispel the idea that the way in which this sacking has taken place is somehow worse than any other in the game or in our own history.

It’s not. It may not have been good, but it’s not incredibly worse than any other.

And as but one brief illustration, I offer the case of Peter Reid, who was dumped, at the start of a season, for having the temerity to hold out on his own new contract in order to secure a pledge of funds for new players.

He’d done remarkably well in the seasons previously and wanted to take the club forward.

For the then owner, Peter Swales, that wasn’t on. He was sacked and Brian Horton appointed.

City fans themselves were so outraged that they launched the campaign that eventually saw Swales leave, to be replaced as chairman by Francis Lee.

So please let’s not be too rosy-tinted about the past. Or imagine that any problems are simply because the owners are not local.

A sacking is never easy – and Mancini might do well to remember that he himself was appointed on the back of one – and when they take place in the full glare of publicity, they’re even less likely to be handled in some sort of perfect way.

For City, the last few years have seen us rise from general laughing stock to a club that the media is hungry for daily stories about, even if it has to make them up.

As a club, we need to learn to deal rather better with rumours, but generally I think that we’re on the right track.

I know some fans are worried that things might now implode. But personally, I doubt that will happen. To start with, if it’s true that relations between coach and players were strained, then it’s unlikely anyone will be wanting away.

Any incoming coach will inherit the core of a very good team – albeit one that does need changes in order to develop and grow – together with everything that the planned Etihad Campus and emphasis on youth development will bring.

To conclude: Roberto – thank you for the last three years. And all the very best for the future. There is absolutely no chance that we will ever forget you.

Addio signore.

For my fellow fans – a new era awaits us. And CTWD.*

* City Til We Die.

The stuff of a Biblical soap opera

And so it began. Or rather - so it began again. If Manchester City fans believed that they had seen the last of Carlos Tevez in a sky blue shirt, then they imagined wrongly.

Because, like the prodigal son of Biblical fame, Carlos has come back, begging for forgiveness. And in equally Biblical fashion, he has felt the arms of the club embrace him again. It might be said that he is – to continue the religious analogies – ‘born again’.

Late yesterday afternoon, Tevez stepped onto a football pitch for the first time since his refusal to warm up – and therefore play – for the Blues in Munich.

That withdrawal of labour had come in the glamorous-as-it-gets Champions’ League, but this return was in a reserve (or elite development squad, to be accurate) match against Preston North End – one of the founder members of the football league to be sure (and the first English league champions), but not romantic opposition these days.

He lasted 45 minutes. Which, after a five-month, self-inflicted holiday, is not bad.

Football is a funny old mix of the pragmatic and the romantic.

For every religious analogy, there are others types. This has gone from low farce to operatic drama to soap opera and back.

Actually, the soap opera is what I keep thinking of - even though I haven't watched one in close to 30 years.

This isn’t EastEnders or Corrie: what’s in my mind is Dynasty, with Tevez all over-sized shoulder pads and a veritable wardrobe full of diva flounces.

Boss Roberto Mancini might have initially lost the plot in the immediate aftermath of the events against Bayern Munich – and I'm being über-critical here – but he has totally out-played Tevez and his band of advisors ever since.

Paternal, calm and offering the possibilities of forgiveness and redemption, it's been a classic performance.

One of the prime parts of the problem, though, is Kia Joorabchian, Tevez’s agent and a man that, frankly and personally, I wouldn’t trust further than I could throw him. In fact, probably less than that. So a bit of a sort of backward pass, as in rugby. But let's stop that analogy right there, before it gets really tortured.

Tevez is, I suspect, hardly the brightest penny in the jar – which is no crime. But actually, in saying that, what I really mean is that, as a son of one the poorest areas of Buenos Airies, he won't have had much formal education.

So let's be clear that he’s done superbly to lift himself from those humble beginnings – and apparently doesn't pretend they didn't occur.

That, of course, brings me to the thought that he's a little like one Diego Maradona. Okay – not quite as gifted, but hardly untalented – but in other ways, there are similarlties.

But one senses the finger of the university-educated Joorabchian – and a bunch of Russian ‘businessmen’ who, through Media Sports Investment, have ‘owned’ the player – in much of the problems that have plagued his entire career.

Of course, there’s the wider problem of agents in football per se: they have a vested interest in unsettling their clients, because that’s how they make money.

Tevez has been being unsettled at City for well over a year – two transfer requests in the last 15 months or so were hardly helpful, plus there was the sulk that saw him have to be threatened with disciplinary action by the club when he was intending to miss the post-FA Cup victory celebrations in the city.

He's certainly not getting good advice.

Last summer, he was almost on his way back to South America after the club had cut its asking price and said that Corinthians could pay in instalments. But that fell through at the last minute.

Hardly surprising, then, that Mancini opted to take the captaincy away from Tevez and give it to the magnificent Vincent Kompany.

All of which provoked another strop from the falling star as he complained about not getting his ‘loyalty bonus’. Well no, Carlos – the clue is in the word ‘loyalty’.

Yet the fans forgave him.

Tevez might be ‘high maintenance’ off the pitch (and Mancini had fallen over backwards to accommodate him more than once, particularly when he was complaining of being home sick), but at least when he was on it, he’d give the proverbial 110%.

So it was hardly surprising that refusal to go on to the pitch – or do the warming up that would have subsequently led to that – would be met with such anger, not just from Mancini, but from the fans.

So what now, with this climate of apology and forgiveness?

Pragmatism, methinks.

Personally, I never wanted to see him near the club again. But the club – although richer that Croesus – needs to comply with the forthcoming new financial rules and could do without letting him go for nothing.

Which rather left sacking out of the equation – and also means he needs to play to avoid a rule whereby, as a senior player, he could walk out without a transfer fee at the end of the season if he didn't make enough appearances.

To get anything like the sort of mood that he would like – and the January transfer window revealed interest but no buyers – Tevez needs to change the theme and remind people that he's actually a damned good player. A game changer, indeed.

So here he is, back at City, with that in mind. Doing his best for the club, on the pitch, is now his way of escape.

And what of the fans?

Well, those of us of a certain vintage might recall comparisons with marital infidelity. Howard Kendall notoriously left the manager's post at Maine Road to return to Everton, declaring the former to have been an extra-marital dalliance and the latter his one true love.

So I would be worried about great claims of love in this instance. But there have been none – and pragmatism might work in our favour.

City have been long enough without a title that, as the possibility of a championship grows slowly closer, I am personally prepared to say that, if Carlos Tevez can bring something positive to the final months of the campaign, then I for one will welcome him – if not exactly with open arms and a ticker tape parade – but with a sage nod and with pragmatism in my heart, and with the continued belief that there is something even greater that (hopefully!) awaits us in the none-too-distant future.