At last, after three decades in the gutter, after heartache, humiliation and epic tragi-comedy on a Shakespearean scale, Manchester City have actually won a trophy. I think I now understand the true meaning of the word ‘disbelief’. Did I let out a primal scream of unadulterated ecstasy at the final whistle? No, not quite. This was no time for complacency. In all honesty, I was still waiting for something to go wrong. The scoreboard read 1-0, the final whistle had been blown, the players were dancing around like lunatics — and yet I couldn’t fully believe that the Cup had been won until I witnessed with my own eyes that Carlos Tevez was actually holding the thing in his hands, that this was no trick of the light, that it was there, tangible, real, not a mirage, no longer a dream.

It was a nervy Cup Final, by far the most stressful sporting occasion I’ve endured since that little trip to Paris 18 months ago. It is now beginning to dawn on me that all Cup Finals must by definition be nervy if you’ve a direct investment, emotional or financial, in one of the participants — and after a wait of exactly 30 years, enjoying it wasn’t really an option. Also, in keeping with City’s time-honoured tradition of outrageous misfortune, I admit I had marked this one down as an almost-certain defeat. Stoke carried quite a bit of form into the big day, and I may have built them up into a terrifying mental vision of irresistible physical power akin to eleven Mike Tysons in their prime.
I had seen no shortage of Rory Delap’s Exocet throw-ins, Kenwyne Jones’ aerial menace, Jermaine Pennant’s crafty crossing, and I suppose I’d forgotten how hopelessly pedestrian the Potters can be when they’re not quite on top of their game. On the biggest day of their modern footballing history, Stoke just didn’t turn up, apart from keeper Thomas Sorensen, who performed heroics and left neutral observers wondering why on earth he has been second choice between the sticks all season long. Yet despite their almost total failure to play (the only honourable outfield exception, Pennant, was limping for most of the match) the score was still 0-0 with 20 minutes left.
Uncharacteristically, Roberto Mancini decided at that point to go hell for leather, shoving on Adam Johnson for Gareth Barry in a high-risk high-reward reshuffle. Reward duly arrived within one minute: Yaya Toure’s strike granted City eternal absolution for 30 years of sinful football, though not before Stoke had retaliated with fifteen agonising minutes of vintage hoofball, winning corner after corner. It wasn’t precise and it wasn’t pretty, but it was still nightmarish to be on the receiving end. Eventually, the storm passed, the clouds parted, and the sky-blue hordes pinched themselves as they entered the kingdom of heaven.
Now, world domination beckons. Indeed, world domination within the next three or four years would appear to be the minimum requirement, in view of the Sheikhs’ rather substantial financial investment. Mancini is still not universally admired; there’s a school of thought that he is far too tactically cautious for his team’s good, and has been content too often with a point when three were perfectly achievable. However, the overall verdict on his reign to date surely has to be a positive one. In the space of a year and a half, he has won the Cup, landed in the top four, tackled the drinking culture, imposed his own stamp on the club, moved on potential troublemakers such as Craig Bellamy (about to be followed, one suspects, by Tevez in the eternal quest for his next signing-on fee), asserted his authority by insisting on extra training sessions and an overall ethic of hard graft, and generally demonstrated that he isn’t interested in winning a dressing-room popularity contest. He may have taken this a little too far by prohibiting the players from drinking on the night of their Cup victory on the basis that they still had two League games left — a player would not need to be particularly selfish or unprofessional to reckon that was asking a bit much — but the general principle, that he isn’t there to make millionaire footballers’ lives as easy as possible, is an admirable one.
One hopes that he will be given time to see the project through, in an age where it seems no manager has leeway to lose more than one match in a row. Back in his early days at United, Alex Ferguson laboured horrifically through an unproductive first few years before finally securing the FA Cup in his fourth season. By all accounts, he was close to the chop more than once during that spell; it’s widely suspected that only the weight of a few wise words from Bobby Charlton stopped the board from wielding the axe. But the Cup bought him valuable time (I might remind you that the Reds finished a pathetic 13th in the League that season) and the rest is history. By contrast, Mancini has taken less than 18 months to end a drought which had raged for 35 years. True, he has had enormous wads of cash to splash, but this can be a double-edged sword, bringing with it colossal levels of pressure from fans and media.
Pressure, as a concept, doesn’t appear to affect Mancini at all, and his innate tactical caution is less potentially crippling than it seemed a few months ago. It was widely feared that a Harlem Globetrotters-style showbiz flimsiness might come to define City when the cash started raining from the skies; but the team in its current incarnation is almost blue-collar, hard-working, unshowy, with Nigel De Jong and Vincent Kompany the polar opposite of flashy. I’m still not sure what to make of the utterly bats Mario Balotelli: best described as a man-child, Mario’s car has been impounded 27 times since moving to Manchester. He has racked up almost £10,000 in parking fines, he broke into a women’s prison last October because he ‘wanted to have a look’, and all in all he doesn’t strike you as the most well-balanced lad on the planet. But the kid can play, is quite a blinding talent at the age of 20, and I suspect his heart is in the right place. I hope so, for everyone’s sake.
My many Man U-supporting pals were strikingly nice to me at the weekend — quite a few of them even seemed genuinely happy for me — so it would seem only fair at this point to grit the teeth and congratulate the Red Devils on their historic 19th League triumph, as they limber up to face Barcelona in the biggest match of them all, the Champions League Final. The evidence of their last outing, a shaky 1-1 draw at Blackburn Rovers, would not exactly strike terror into Catalan hearts, but we know that United at their best are capable of anything.
I have thought this one through over and over again, and can’t realistically see any joy for United. The only way to beat Barca is to defend brilliantly for the entire 90 minutes and extract maximum mileage out of any counter-attacking opportunities that come your way. This was executed to perfection by Jose Mourinho’s Inter last year, but there are grounds for suspecting that Barca are stronger now than they were then. Fergie has never been one for sophisticated negativity, and on the occasions he’s attempted it, hasn’t got it right. But if United go all-out in a hell-for-leather frenzy, they run the risk of being completely overrun in terms of ball possession. Chicarito’s bat-out-of-hell goal in the first minute against Chelsea last week set the tone for a quite majestic display, and if it all comes together – pace, power, speed, accuracy and resolute tackling – they can certainly compete. Still, the strong suspicion here is that the collective brilliance of Messi, Xavi, Villa, Iniesta and friends will be a little too much for United to cope with, even at their best.
But I am hugely looking forward to it as a contest, if not exactly from a neutral perspective, and I intend to enjoy it to the max. I have long since cured myself of any compulsion to crawl under a rock and die whenever United win things. Age bestows a certain perspective, a stoicism, a realisation that perhaps Shankly wasn’t entirely accurate when he diagnosed football as being more important than life, love or death. And if they do win the bloody thing, all I need to do to for a swift cure is lash on the recording of the Cup Final. My all-time signature tune, Marvin Rainwater’s ‘My Brand Of Blues’, never quite sounded as sweet as it does now. Some things will last forever...