DANCING WITH YOUR SISTER

Ready or not, the big day has dawned.

Aptly enough we start with a no-holds-barred, no-noise-whatsoever Derby between the Highbury Library dwellers and the denizens of the Emptihad. The profundity and intense heat of the banter chambers will surely be stoked beyond volcanic as this one kicks us all off into a brave new world of live feeds from the pre-match referee huddle and substitute on and off music (no jokes here, please, about what to put on when Ilkay is removed).

Whilst our minds have been quietly boggling, the big bad bods at the FA have been busy with their ideas.

Like Pep Guardiola, seemingly a little anxious to see if the FA's all-encompassing restriction code will allow him and Mikel Arteta to share a bottle of Muga Gran Reserva together after the match, we too must work out how best to cope with its strangeness. 

Will the players run obediently to the designated goal celebration camera if they score? (this has been worrying me far more than it should. I dream of Kevin de Bruyne shaking his hips to a camera that has been turned off and it brings me out in a cold sweat). What if they don’t bother preening to the audience at all? What if they touch each other by mistake?

For City, as for many, the resumption of league battles means little beyond getting the thing over the line. Liverpool will be silent champions within three or so games and the troubled clubs at the bottom will have to sweat and spit at a safe distance, but for the rest it is an exercise in keeping fit and avoiding intimate tackle contact.

Where City’s story hots up is in the cups. There is after all an FA Cup to defend. The infamously wretched slaughter of Watford, when some of our country’s finest writers downed tools and refused to record the day’s business, means the holders’ trip to Newcastle will carry a certain amount of interest.

Cup football was always decried as a lottery. Now that everything is, we can all relax. The grandest lottery of them all is our beloved Champions League, the apple of our eye, the grit in our belly buttons, the jam on the kitchen floor.

This, of course, is really where City’s owners’ ears prick up. For years the holy grail, glory in Europe at this stage might just be too typically City for some of us to cope with. After a 50-year hiatus, an appearance in what would be a second European final for the club, on the very occasion when nobody can be there would for many be the pinnacle of Cityitis.

The litany of daft episodes in the club’s mottled history have been trotted out enough times not to be repeated here. Suffice to say, the idea of City managing to hoist the flag in such circumstances, with a two-year ban still standing to be confirmed, is a true tickler. A club built on contrariness and self-inflicted hardship deserves its time in the sun. When the sun is Portuguese and the stadium is empty, however, you begin to ask yourself where this satire can all end.

In 1970, City carried off the Cup Winners Cup, a defunct and much maligned contest for oddball clubs from far flung places, with barely 10,000 souls watching. Other finals in the tournament rendered even smaller crowds. It was the nature of the beast. Even then the FA forbade the BBC from televising the game live from Vienna. City fans (unless you were one of the 4,000 dripping wet adventurers who travelled across Europe that night) had to wait until the following evening just to see the BBC highlights.

Ironically, the final had clashed with the replay of the FA Cup final between Chelsea and Leeds United. While ITV screened that live, nobody saw the final of the tournament that the FA Cup was a feeder for. Work that one out. Chelsea edged out Leeds and, while everyone was watching David Webb head the winner at Old Trafford, a soaking wet Tony Book hoisted the elegant Cup Winners Cup in washed out Vienna.

Bring a brolly and sensible shoes

A repeat of that in sunny Lisbon with a backing of 60,000 red bucket seats at the Estadio da Luz would knock Vienna into a cocked hat, simultaneously providing the banter brigade with a decade’s worth of oxygen. Not only is it the only trophy the club now really craves to complete the set, it is possibly the only ridiculous scenario that hasn’t already been played out before us down the long and bristly years.

But there is a serious side to all this. Thousands are dead from a virus without a cure and we are shuffling, albeit virtually, back down to the football. How we are meant to feel about this is still unclear. Guilty, elated, non-plussed. Angry, bewildered, ill-prepared. Or just grateful and expectant?

Perplexed, perhaps.

Perhaps the best state of mind to be in is neutral. It is a rare position in these days of tribal frothing, but maybe we should give it a try. We should perhaps wait and see what sort of effect it has on us. Football, as Marcus Rashford has ably demonstrated, can be a superbly galvanizing vehicle for good. It can lift us out of the gloom and carry us away from our troubles, if only for 90 dreamy minutes. It can also dump you right back down in the quagmire quickly enough. City are by no means unique in wielding these dual powers. However, a silent journey to European football’s highest mountain would simultaneously answer many critics but also blow more giant bubbles into the history of a club that has never been able to do normal for longer than a couple of months. 

We can’t stop the juggernaut, so step aside, flatten that fluffy hair a little and let the whole multi-coloured charabanc through.