City Indoors, The Prematch Prattle

Good morning,

I’m find it it difficult to get ma hate on, blud for Manchester City. In fact,  I’m finding it difficult to feel anything toward them at all. 

I saw them play last week. It was very much like watching show reels from beta trial of a football computer game. The big Eastern block bloke up front; a smattering of burly English ‘Roast Beef’ types and then just a conveyor belt of imported mediterranean gits with all with varying takes on a short back and sides and they must all use the same shade of hair dye. ‘Taxi de Londres, pout homme.

Then I saw an advert for a computer football game with Samir Nasri’s head or at least a chillingly gormless looking likeness of said chump popping out of a City shirt. This seemingly released not twenty minutes after he was officially announced. This simply served to nudge me further into feeling not very much. That and did the ‘amazing’ Mr Ed get much work endorsing stuff, I wondered.

This isn’t a backhanded swipe to vent my jealously, by the way. They are indeed on the march with Abu Dhabi and pretty much buying everyone they see. I get that and in an incredibly scaled down version so’s everyone else so I can’t pretend to find it distasteful, it’s just I can’t imagine it tasting of very much at all.

I remember seeing Berbatov smiling and leaping about with his new chums at Yanited when they won something shortly after he arrived. He was doing his best, but I just knew they knew nothing about him and he knew nothing about them. Like watching some old man amiably tapping his glass to the pub’s background music. He isn’t doing any harm, but could he tell you who’s playing let alone what album Since You’ve Been Gone appeared on?

No, whatever way you look at it,  the whole City thing is just a bit strange. Good luck to ’em I guess. The Berabtovs, the old soaks and and the computer generated international blow ins that sail along benignly to someone else’s soundtrack that they can only hum along to.

Will we win? You need me to raise this and get the old metaphoric ball rolling I guess. In short if the play like Hearts did a week or so ago, we’ll obliterate ’em. If they play better than Hearts we will by degree have our superiority in my crazy dream land considerably diminished.

Last season they were our opening game, weren’t they? It was 0-0 but an incredible game. We played very well I recall. The City of this season is a different beats or at least it was at Bolton. They played ‘attacking football’ and Bobby Manc sent his back line to sit high up the field when they were mounting raids. Wingbacks were  very much the order of the day.

Owen Coyle couldn’t capitalise on this as many of his midfield maestros were dropped on their heads as babies and getting them to incorporate a football into running caused them to fall over a bit or flail their limbs wildly.

In my estimation we should look to do them on the break. If we attack without drawing them they could close ranks and to go at them then would be frankly hard work. Bus, parked, bleedin’, the.

What needs to be balanced tomorrow are the karma books at The Lane. After Thursday’s ‘thing’ it’s absolutely vital that everyone cheers, whoops, hollers and generally gets down with their bad selves. Even in the face of those who may or may not still be suffering Chicken Badge© allergies.

Prediction? We’ll score one more than you. Come on you Spurs! As our new best mate Benny would and indeed does say.