Wednesday 5 December 2012

Dark Blue



It started in defeat, it ended in defeat, and there was nothing to shout about in between. That’s the short, gloomy story of City’s 2012-13 Champions League campaign.

It’s difficult to draw any positives, other than the fact that the squad has gained more of the much-vaunted “European experience” that some quarters say is so essential in these kinds of situations.

Last year, one result ended up killing us – it was the 1-1 draw at home to Napoli. If we have won that, we’d have been into the knockout stages at the first time of asking. This year, three draws at home effectively gave us no chance, but by the time we came to the last of those home fixtures – against Real Madrid – the momentum was already lost.

And it had all started so well.

Travelling to Madrid for our very first match of Group D was no easy task, but by the 86th minute we were 2-1 up and heading for a historic victory. Five minutes later it had all gone wrong, a trademark Cristiano Ronaldo strike putting us to the sword, and we went home empty handed.  Looking back, that result was our Napoli result this time around, and we never recovered.

We could have put things back on track two weeks later, at home to Borussia Dortmund, but we came away with a point.  Then came the hammer blow. With the next two games coming first away and then home against Ajax, I think a lot of fans expected us to get things back on track with six points. Instead – once again - we only managed one, and things came apart.

But it’s one thing looking at the results and another to look at the performances – this is the real concern. Things were always going to be tough against Real, but we capitulated in the Bernabeu. We were played off the park at the Etihad against Dortmund. We lost a winning position away at Ajax, and then had to come from 2-0 down at home against the Dutch team to salvage a point. You can’t be going 2-0 down at home against the weakest team of the group and expect much in return.

There was a lot of debate surrounding the final game against Dortmund. Some fans wanted us to go for the win, snatch third spot in Group D and then qualify for the Europa League. Others wanted us to lose, finish bottom of the group and thus not qualify for a competition they saw as second grade, a distraction to our league and FA cup push.

Of course, the latter got their wish, and along with it came the record of being the lowest-ever Champions League group points total returned by an English club. That’s not a record I’m proud of.

A run to the latter stages of the Europa League would have also increased our UEFA coefficient, which in the long term will spare us the fortune of being lumped with a group as hard as the ones we’ve had to endure. Now we won’t have the chance to do that, and will instead likely have to face Group of Death part three next year.

We have of course also been unlucky with the draw in both years. I’m not an expert on UEFA coefficients, but this year, the likes of Malaga ranking (66th) and Montpellier’s (97th) are well below City’s (19th), and yet because of the luck of the draw, they got distinctly easier groups that City did. Drawing Dortmund in Pot 4 was the killer.  We could have had Cluj, instead we got the German champions. The margin of error in the Champions League is slim at best, but for us – this year - it was minute.

But we can whine on about draws all we want. For the money that has been lavished on this squad, for the facilities they have, for the player care department that pampers to their every need, there is no excuse – this Champions League has gone badly wrong for us.

Given our recent history, some will say we should be grateful to be in the Champions League at all. But that's a loser's view. We weren't there to make up the numbers.

One thing’s for sure – this early exit won’t have been in the 10-year plan of Mansour and Khaldoon. They invest in progress, not regression. And so for this club not to be involved in European football is surely unacceptable for the men from Abu Dhabi, the men who usually win, whatever they turn their hand to.

So now all eyes turn to the men in Manchester, who are tasked with winning. Inevitably, questions will be asked of them and of their leader, Roberto Mancini. The Champions League monkey on his back just got a whole lot bigger. Remaining in the Europa would have lessened the media/fan focus that is now going be brought with full force on City’s every move on the domestic front.

Silverware is managerial oxygen at the Etihad these days, and Mancini’s options are getting blocked off. He needs to keep winning – its as simple as that.

I’ve written before about Mancini’s days of judgment nearing. Those first set of judgments – a top four finish, winning a cup, and then winning the league – he passed with flying colours. But football waits for no man and now further judgments are on their way.

The team is at a defining point of their season. They’ve come nowhere near reaching the heights of last year and at times have looked a bit labored and out of ideas when the magic of David Silva is not around.

The wreckage of the Champions League lies around them, but somehow, the English Champions must put that ordeal behind them, find strength in adversity, and steal themselves for the task that now lies ahead.

Just look down the road – isn’t that what champions do?






Wednesday 19 September 2012

If D is for Death, then C is for Capitulation


We all thought last year’s Champions League group stage was hard, but unfortunately for City, this year it is looking like a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire.

The Blues' schooling in the highest class of club football goes on, and Real Madrid certainly dealt out a few lessons in their 3-2 victory at the Bernabeu on Tuesday night.

As we felt very painfully last year, the Champions League will always be a competition of fine margins, and so it proved again on Tuesday night.

After having been dominated in the first half (Madrid’s possession stats were something like 70 percent) City grew into the game and eventually went ahead with Edin Dzeko’s well-taken strike.

Then came the defining passage of play. Yaya Toure, our biggest threat going forward, went on another of those surging runs through the middle and found himself in on Iker Casillas, only to drive his shot into the side netting. Madrid went up the other end and Brazilian left back/left winger Marcelo scored, and City’s defensive dam had broken. It might’ve been a different game if we’d have gone 2-0 up. Instead it was 1-1.

But at 1-1 we still didn’t give up and when Alexander Kolarov’s freekick flew into the Real net on 85 minutes, you felt we were on the verge of something historic.

That only served to spur Real on, Karim Benzema leveling having been given the time to turn in the penalty area, and then in the final minute Cristiano Ronaldo of all people thumping a shot from the edge of the area past Joe Hart to secure the win and confirm our late, late capitulation. Ronaldo had been largely restricted to long range shots all night, but this final one turned out to be effective.

Hart should have done better with the shot. I don’t know whether his vision was blocked – and of course we should acknowledge the quality of the shot itself – but you felt the England number one should have least got his hand to it. That said, Hart was the main reason why we were still in the game when the first half came to a close, producing a string of fine saves.

Defensively too, we were not quite at the races, just as I don’t think we have been this season.

You can criticize Mancini for his selection, but you can also compliment him for his decisions. 

Maicon and Matija Nastasic starting for the first time, Garcia in his second game, and Barry in his first game back after injury – were all risks, not in terms of quality, but in terms of consistency and understanding. Then again, football is a game of risks. Perhaps Lescott would have been a better choice – if nothing else than for the partnership he has with Kompany. Maybe he was injured.

But then, look at Mancini’s substitution of Silva for Dzeko – it gave us a cutting edge and put us in the lead almost immediately, and was an inspired substitution. We all would have been lauding Mancini for that if we had won.

The plus side of selecting Maicon and Nastasic is that they are being blooded with the rest of the team. The young Serb looks a good deal. I couldn’t have imagined Stefan Savic playing in this game, but this lad handled it.

We all knew it was never going to be easy against the Spanish champions, but that said, on another night we could have received a hammering. The most worrying thing for me was the first half performance – we could not get the ball off Real.

Barcelona tend to do that against Real when the two giants meet, so just imagine how City would have coped against Barca?

It just shows the gulf that exists between winning the Premier League and then taking on Europe’s cream of the crop, and it shows how far we still have to go to becoming Europe’s best, which is where we want to be.

I still feel that we should be winning a few more Premier League’s before the Champions League becomes a realistic target. Yes, we have a squad with European experience, but they have not played much together, let alone won together, Europe’s top competition.

The next game against Borussia Dortmund now becomes a must win. The importance of winning at home cannot be overstated. Last year, it was the home draw with Napoli at the beginning of the competition that kicked us out in the end. We should have won that game and we have to make sure that does not now happen again.

Sunday 19 August 2012

Lost soul


As it’s cover would suggest, David Conn’s new book Richer than God: Manchester City, modern football and growing up is primarily a tale about Manchester City. It is both the story of the club’s shambolic fall from grace and then astonishing rise back to the top of the English game, backed by the millions of a sheikh from Abu Dhabi.

Taken in its entirety though, the book is about much more than City. It’s about the rise of the obscenities of modern football, or more specifically the Premier League, flush with its mega millions with players on hundreds of thousands of pounds a week, while the grass roots of the game silently rots away. For Conn, the rise of “the money game” as he describes it has destroyed the very soul of the game itself, along with his love City, the team he supported so fervently well into his twenties, which now due to its untold wealth is perhaps the clearest example of all that is wrong with the modern game.

Richer than God is a must read for City fans wanting to enrich their understanding of just how close the club has come to financial ruin over the past few decades. The rot started in the 1970s, when chairman Peter Swales – installed in 1973 and charged with the task of carrying on the club’s glory era of the late 1960s. City had the opportunity to dominate the era, but instead Swales appointed the wrong managers and oversaw a mass exodus of talent from the club, wasting a fortune on lower grade replacements. Conn describes it as a “great purge” and points to how traumatic it was for City fans. “Even now, writing this, I still can’t believe what happened,” he says. The desolation leaps off the page.

That experience alone must have been bad, but the years that followed, decades even, which saw relegations that eventually culminated in the club languishing in England’s third tier, were even worse. As Conn writes, this was the era when former City manager Joe Royle coined the phrase “Cityitis” – which tries to explain how good players seemed prone to messing things up whenever they put on a Blue shirt.

But as Conn expertly perceives, “Cityitis” is as equally uncomfortable for fans. “There is something more profound in [Cityitis],” writes Conn. “[It is] the nestling of misfortune deep in the bosom of triumph.”

Conn’s insight into the current regime running the club, headed by Sheikh Mansour, a member of the ruling family of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, is unparalleled.

After all the heartache and despair, City are now the richest club in the world and are the number one team in England, having won the English league last season backed by the Sheikh’s millions.

For Conn the new City, which as one would expect being owned by a Sheikh, is a slick, professional business operation geared toward achieving results of the highest order, is out of character with the club’s traditional personality of enduring “whatever life bloody threw at you”. He has a point, but to me how City became the richest club in the world is just another example of the club’s erratic, bi-polar history since the early 1970s. With City you have to expect the unexpected. Sometimes it’s been good, most times it’s been bad.

Conn’s access to Mansour’s people is unmatched. There’s analysis of where the club’s chairman, Khaldoon Al-Mubarak, fits into the Abu Dhabu government. Being chairman of City is just one of Khaldoon’s many high profile, strategic roles.

According to Conn, Mansour’s people have always been at pains to say that buying City was Mansour’s private investment – the deal had nothing to do with the Abu Dhabi state, of which Mansour is a minister for presidential affairs.

But I’m not certain how the political and the private can be separated in a situation such as this. It’s well known that Abu Dhabi is looking for ways to diversify its economy once the oil runs out. It’s looking for ways to tell the world about itself and Manchester City represents one way of doing that.

City will potentially serve a dual function for Mansour. As a businessman, the club stands to make him a lot of money if he gets the management of it right. As a high-ranking politician in the Abu Dhabi emirate, the club also acts as a projection of the emirate’s image overseas, boiled down to the bare bones, a softer element of its foreign policy.

The history of Mansour’s country, the reason for him getting involved in the club and the state that he found the club in, are all documented by Conn in detail here – once again essential reading for those wantingan insight  into the mindset of the club’s current owners, about which not a great deal is known.

Any fan of the modern game should also cast an eye over these pages.

Conn speaks from the heart about the way football used to be and the way it now. This change is told through Conn’s own life trajectory, with City the vehicle through which he spins the yarn.

A City fan from the age of six, supporting the team from the mid-1970s onwards with unbridled devotion, Conn’s career turned toward investigative journalism. As millions of pounds flowed into the game in the early 1990s, Conn began to look into the financial side of football and came to realize his beloved club – just like many others – has become a business, owned by people who were at base only concerned about making large amounts of money out of the loyalties of the fans.  As a result, Conn’s footballing innocence is lost to the point where he no longer feels comfortable being a part of a club he has supported since he was a boy.

The English Football Association (FA), the creators of today’s worldwide game, are put to the sword by Conn for gradually allowing the game’s commercialization to spiral out of control.

As Conn explains, in the beginning the FA were against clubs paying players and also against clubs becoming money making machines for those that owned them. Later on, the FA also prioritized financial equality through clubs sharing the proceeds of attendance at games, which, Conn says, made the game more competitive on the pitch, with smaller teams having a better chance of winning things.

In the face of pressure from the big clubs, Conn charts the slow, spineless retreat of the FA on each of these principles, which ultimately culminated in the big clubs threatening to breakaway from the football league if they were not granted a greater share of a lucrative SKY TV deal that ushered in the Premier League era in the early 1990s. Conn tells of how the FA acquiesced in the deal, thinking it could continue to control the game – a “fateful” decision that was the precursor to fans being screwed by higher ticket prices and many younger fans being priced out of attending, which in turn led to the decline in stadium atmospheres – especially given the onset of all seater stadiums.

For the clubs, “the Premier League is about making as much money as possible without having to share it,” according to Conn.

The calamity of City is reintroduced into the story here, when Conn analyses a takeover of the club headed by former City playing legend Francis Lee, and is rocked back by its details.

Far from really caring about the progress of the club, Conn potrays Lee as someone who was in it to make a fortune for himself, with plans to build a new stand with restaurants serving top class food charged at top class prices.

Conn comes to the realization that what he thought of as his club was in fact now a business, subjected to a “corporate tangle between businessmen looking to make money for themselves out of owning the shares.”

All this of course was just the start of football’s uber-commercialization. People talk about City ruining football with their untold wealth, but the City that many feel repulsed by today – owned by a Sheikh who has pumped millions in to win the league – is only the end, most extreme point of this process.

Businessman and tax exile Jack Walker invested tens of millions of pounds in Blackburn Rovers to fund their Premier League title in the mid 1990s. Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich did the same at the turn of this century, but only to a bigger extent. Manchester United are not viewed in the same light because they have been at the top of so long (no foreign owner put them there). In reality though, United are no different. They complain about today’s ridiculous transfer market prices, but only after they spent somewhere in the region of 19m on Ruud Van Nistelrooy, 28m on Juan Veron, 27m on Rio Ferdinand, 27m on Wayne Rooney, 18m on Michael Carrick, 30m on Dimitar Berbatov, 19m on David de Gea and 17m on Ashley Young. United have spent big to retain their power at the top of the English game. Other clubs have spent big to get there.

Conn contrasts the obscene nature of the modern game with its antithesis – supporter owned football clubs. He visits FC United of Manchester, a club set up by Manchester United fans who did not want to line the pockets of their club’s new owner, American Malcolm Glazer, who has since loaded United with around 500m pounds worth of debt. Attending FC United, listening to their chants of resistance about destroying Glazer and SKY tv, Conn says is a “cleansing of the palate”. If there is another way to a more equal game, then this must be it.

The most compelling part of this book is Conn’s damaged relationship with City and modern football. His realization of the truth – that football clubs had become money making machines – and his revulsion at that truth, seemed to me at first to be a little naïve. But then I grew up in the era of Premier League. To me, clubs have always been businesses. Fans aren’t stupid. Many know they are being ripped off but they go along with it all, wanting to see their team win trophies. For most, it is a trade off. But Conn is a purist. His evangelism for a more equal game transcends colours of any team and is refreshing.

He seems resigned to never reconciling himself to the club and game that he loved, instead destined to roam the fields of objectivity, without a footballing home. Even as he charts City’s journey to the title last season in the book’s final chapter, Conn is still left questioning it all, and the message that City’s title win gives to impressionable young fans watching the game: “Reach for the stars, work hard, keep going until the very end and get a Sheikh to put in £1bn.”

In the end, it is hard to disagree with it all, wherever your loyalties lie. 

Sunday 12 August 2012

The first defence


It’s that time again - the start of the season - but this time with a twist that many City fans have yet to experience – the first defence of the Premier League title.

The high-octane effects of last season took their time wear off, but victory is always insatiable, a thirst quenched only by the taste of further victories. Sergio Aguero’s goal against QPR will never be forgotten, but now it is history and the club must focus all its will on repeating the feat – albeit more surefootedly – this time around.

This season that has to be the priority. The question is can they do it?

It’s been a good pre-season as far as pre-seasons go, winning the majority of matches, although nowadays one senses these things are more about opening the club up to new markets than anything else. The plus points are that we don’t have too many injuries, and we’ve also had the opportunity to blood more youngsters.

Today of course we also won the FA Community Shield, the trophy that eluded us last year when we shot ourselves in the foot against United, surrendering a two goal lead in a game we should have easily won.

Even if it means little, it’s a nice start to our season as champions.

However, the transfer market – or rather City’s inability to move decisively within it – has to a large extent overshadowed these positives. The frustration of this situation was most clearly evident in Mancini’s press conference prior to today’s match, with the City manager simply referring the vast majority of transfer questions to City’s head of football administration Brian Marwood – the man responsible for acquiring new players.

City of course are also hamstrung by the new financial fair play (FFP) rules, and their need to cut the wage bill or, at least, keep it on an even keel. The two most notable culprits - Emmanuel Adebayor and Roque Santa Cruz – have not yet been moved on, meaning that we can hardly add to a frontline that boasts four top class strikers.

There’s also a sense of club that will no longer be held to ransom. We were surely there in the market for the likes of Thiago Silva and Robin van Persie, but the hierarchy are now much less willing to pay over the odds for this kind of talent, and are much more keen to drive a harder bargain. The Daniel Agger transfer story smacks of this. We all know the spending of recent years just isn’t sustainable and, if continued, would see us kicked out of Europe because of FFP. At any rate, the true holy grail is bringing through our own talent.

Chelsea and United have both strengthened, and of course we should be looking to – no team can ever stand still. We certainly need new faces for the Champions League if nothing else. But if the squad remains unchanged until January it shouldn’t be a cue for all hell to break loose.

We’ve now got something at City that we haven’t had for decades: consistency. There will always be power battles within the club – managers will always want new players and administrators will want to do it in a way that is right for the club. One thing that gets lost in all this is that we’ve a strong, balanced squad, with good depth and exceptional talent. The spine of team is now established: Hart, Kompany, Yaya, and any one from our four top strikers.

The other big plus is that we’ve some exciting new talent on the fringes. Anyone watching the pre-season friendlies will have seen the likes of Karim Rekik, Abdul Razak and Dennis Suarez. Hopefully we’ll see a bit more of them soon.



Sunday 15 July 2012

MCFC PRSS: Stylish new news source for MCFC fans

I thought I'd give a mention to MCFC PRSS, a relatively new website that draws together news on City from a variety of different angles, from newspapers to blogs - all packed neatly and stylishly onto one page.

To access MCFC PRSS, click here.

It can also be found on Twitter: @FootballPRSS.

Wednesday 16 May 2012

The ultimate victory


For those who want to understand the true meaning of the events at the Etihad Stadium last Sunday, read no further than the sub-title of this blog.

Sunday’s game was the perfect microcosm of what it is to support Manchester City, the new Champions of England.

The game is now days away, but for me and I should imagine most other City fans, the unbelievable high remains.

I’ve been writing this blog since 2009, I’ve been a City fan since the day I was born in 1981, but nothing, nothing can truly describe what happened on the turf of the Etihad last Sunday.

As the game drew to a close, and as the realization dawned that defeat was, unbelievably, after all that we had done, cruelly upon us, I found myself experiencing something particularly unpleasant.

For this was a new strain of Cityitis, the debilitating disease we had all hoped had been eradicated. Now, suddenly, unexplainably, from out of nowhere, it was back, and not only that – now it was stronger than ever before and with a new, particularly cruel and virulent twist. In the past, we had always been haunted from a position of weakness. Now we were being haunted on the edge of the glory. I could see the headlines being written as the game closed in, and all hope ebbed away.

But not this time.

Just when the chains of typical City threatened to pull us back into a dungeon of despair, this City team stood up and proved they had what it took to win the title.

By now, we all know the story. 2-1 down, the clocked ticked into injury time, with United still winning at Sunderland.

Everything we tried during that second half just didn’t come off. We tried intricate passes through the middle, crosses from both flanks, shots from distance.

To their credit QPR defended brilliantly. In many ways the game reminded me of a Barcelona-Chelsea Champions League semi-final in 2009 at the Nou Camp, where Chelsea invited the Catalans onto them and just flooded the penalty area with bodies, limiting Barca to very few clear cut chances.

That was the case here. We had a massive amount of possession, crosses, shots – but hardly any of it was incisive.

And so, by the 92nd minute, we were staring down the barrel of a gun. Enter Edin Dzeko. A corner from David Silva, so often our man of the moment this season, found the head of the Bosnian who powered it down the centre of the goal past QPR keeper Paddy Kenny.

The darkness had descended, but now, somehow, from somewhere, a glimmer of hope had reappeared. Time was still against us, but I found myself thinking: Could it be?

Mancini, normally so collected on the touchline, was raging at his troops, urging them back to the restart. The pressure was white hot. It was unreal.

It was the last attack of the season. From the restart, we wrested back control of the ball from a QPR side that until now had been so stubborn, so resolute in their defence.

But they were cracking at the base. As often happens in games where one team goes for the jugular, and another team just defends, defends and defends, one goal was all it took. The Dzeko strike was crucial. Suddenly, as the Blues swept forward, with the last chance upon our shoulders, the gaps, the angles that we had sought so incessantly throughout the match, finally started to appear.

And commeth the minute, commeth the man. A string of City passes through the heart of the QPR defence found Sergio Aguero in the area. The Argentinean skipped the first tackle, composed himself, and fired the ball past Paddy Kenny into the back of the net.

We had won the Premier League. From the pits of despair we had come back. We were Champions, in the most unbelievable fashion imaginable. As one fan put it – this was Roy of the Rovers on speed.
We had stared down the barrel of the gun, but this time, as our world closed in on us, a millisecond before the trigger was about to be pulled, we ducked, swiveled the gun around and pulled the trigger ourselves.

This was escapology of the highest order.

From desperation, from frustration, from despair, to the heights of elation, the heights of ecstasy, to the heights of our history, in minutes. No Blue will ever forget Sunday 13th May 2012.

Some teams torture their supporters but no-one is as sadistic as City. Thirteen years ago we were staring into the abyss in the old Division 3. Today we are champions. No. No team does it like quite like City, because City are City. And no team ever will. There is no story quite like that in modern football.

We deserved this title. Having defeated our closest rivals home and away, having played some of the best football the league has witnessed, this is our time. And this is City’s year.

It is too early to turn to next season. For now, Blues will enjoy the magnitude of what happened last Sunday. And no-one can begrudge them that.

They have suffered long enough. But now, the Blue Moon that has been rising since 2008 has well and truly risen. I can only applaud the club for how it has gone about achieving this most special of trophy wins.

As one fantastic chapter closes, another exciting chapter opens as this club – Manchester City, the champions of England – continues to go from strength to strength to strength.

Saturday 5 May 2012

Jakarta’s responsible ‘Mancunians’


Manchester, la, la, la! Manchester, la, la, la!

The famous Mancunian chant came not from the night of Manchester, but from the early morning of Jakarta, Indonesia.

It came not only from the throng of City fans, but also from an equally large group of United fans, both of whom had gathered in an outdoor café in the centre of the capital to watch what was billed as one of the biggest derbies ever.


The tension that reverberated throughout this match was there for all to see and feel. It rained down from the stands, onto the pitch and into our café through the big TV screen that was propped up by a tree.

Watching the game at 2:00 am in the morning was surreal enough, never mind that Jakarta’s streets and main thoroughfares, normally seething with the city’s 11 million vehicles, were eerily empty as we made our way to the café unimpeded. 


The stress normally felt by navigating your way through the traffic was gone, only to be replaced by something much worse, a feeling that many City fans know all too well - that very particular mix of both the dread and the hope of what is about to materialize as Derby day approaches. Times that by a thousand for this particular encounter, and then some.

We arrived at the venue and a black grill gate, swung open, revealed a makeshift and uneven car park – much akin to that outside the stadium formally known as Eastlands a couple of years ago - with rows of cars, vans and motorbikes piled in. On the left hand side of the enclosure was the café; big screen in the corner, marquee over the top to protect the electronics from an unexpected monsoon, red shirts on one side, blue shirts on the other. City vs United - in Jakarta.

Once inside the café, I was amazed at the pre-game build up. The chanting started, and for the large part it was spot on – and not a foreigner in sight apart from yours truly. The City fans sang “Hark though hear” and the United fans came back with “Glory, glory Man United”. “City till I die” was met with “We love United, we do!”

At half time, being the only bule (white man) in the crowd, I was asked if I wanted to join the City supporters club in Jakarta. For right of entry, I had to give the names of three City managers before Roberto Mancini. A Sven-Goran Eriksson, a Stuart Pearce and a Joe Royle later, and I'd been blooded, a membership card being temporarily given to me to confirm my membership (a ritual performed by all of Jakarta’s 500 City supporters club members, with the card was immediately given back to the organizer because there was only one in existence!).

With the Blue half of the crowd a little giddy given their team’s lead, the organizers of the event reminded everyone to be respectful of the opposing side’s fans. The request was observed almost perfectly, with nothing boiling over as the game’s tension grew higher and higher – a far cry from the antics of Mancini and Ferguson on the touchline of the Etihad.

I was mightly impressed with the restraint shown by both sets of supporters – how City fans didn’t bait their United counterparts I don’t know, and likewise how United fans didn’t let the frustration at their team’s performance boil over is beyond me.

It is a far cry from many drinking establishments in England, where for some the rivalry is too much, the prize too big, to resist mocking the opponent and therefore getting into a skirmish.

Indonesians love football, and don’t get me wrong - they are no strangers to football hooliganism. The Jakmania, which is the 100,000 strong supporters club of one of Jakarta’s teams Persija Jakarta – boasts unhealthy rivalries with Viking (supporters club attached to Persib Bandung – based in a city about three hours drive away) and Bonek (supporters club attached to Persebaya – based about 500 miles east of Jakarta).

However, there was something admirable about the way these Blue and Red Indonesians were managing supporter relations. With not a Munich chant in sight, I suddenly felt further than ever away from the hatred and the acidic atmosphere of Mary D’s.