City's fulsome support squeezes into the Moss Rose |
Bradford City’s
considerable achievement in knocking out Aston Villa to reach this season’s
League Cup final brings out differing emotions for followers of Manchester
City: mirth at the haplessness of a fellow top flight side is always a good
place to start for football supporters, but this is tinged with sympathy, as
many of us have been in similar situations and – in the case of City followers
– it brings back plenty of painful memories of times not so long past, when our
delightful club would have had modest difficulty beating its way out of a wet
paper bag.
City may now be looked
at as one of the big guns, locked into that cosy cartel at the top of the tree.
Indeed, even fellow Top Four merchants are ganging up against the sky blues in
a thinly disguised bid to tip the playing field back in their direction. Led by
that charitable institution Manchester United, these grandees of English
football, amongst them the paupers of Arsenal and Tottenham, are trying to curb
City’s spending for good by implementing England’s very own FFP measures. As
many have already said, if United think it’s a good idea, then it’s probably worth taking a good close look at the small print at the bottom of page 49.
20 years ago, Manchester
United had bigger fish to fry and took great glee in reminding City supporters
that their neighbours did not feature on their radars at all. Ignoring somebody
can be far worse than insulting them sometimes. City were a speck on the
horizon and were about to get a lot more distant in the ensuing decade....
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