City Sickness

To paraphrase Alex Ferguson: Football, fucking hell. It doesn’t, can’t, never will, never could get any crazier than this. Regular Foul Play readers will have been following the peaks and troughs of the last few months, as the greatest season in living memory has spun an epic narrative through endless twists and turns to the point where it all came down to one day’s football. And, truth be told, I don’t know if I’ll ever recover.

I would like in all sincerity to express my deepest sympathy to Manchester United fans at this point, and no, I’m not taking the piss. Harder hearts might suggest that a dose of 95th-minute frustration and heartache won’t do them any harm at all, but I can’t imagine how horrific it must feel to lose the title in such a fashion, and I wouldn’t dream of inflicting it on anybody.
Perhaps it is the case that most football fans grow up accustomed to winning, that their formative footballing memories are happy ones. Undoubtedly, this is the case for all Red Devils fans under the age of about 30. The horrible, gut-wrenching, empty sensation of feeling like losers will have remained largely alien to them, whereas in my case, it’s been an integral part of the entire experience from an early age.
I can vaguely remember weeping profusely at the age of six when City lost an epic Cup Final 3-2 to Spurs; more vividly, I can recall the torment of being relegated two seasons later, when City succumbed 1-0 on the final day to a horribly late goal from Luton’s Raddy Antic, prompting manager David Pleat to perform a demented spontaneous dance of delight, while the sky-blue masses attempted to come to terms with the unbearable grief.
The sensation of relegation would become an extremely familiar one over the decades that followed, as City bounced between the divisions like a hyperactive ping-pong ball. The nadir was the day in 1996 when a Niall Quinn-inspired City bit the Premiership dust (again on closing day) thanks in large part to the stunning, rank incompetence of manager Alan Ball, who ordered his players to play keep-ball and run down the clock as time expired, unaware that they actually needed a victory rather than a draw in order to save their skins.
Forgive the history lesson. The point is that City fans have come to be on very intimate terms with misery, agony, pain and humiliation. But the events of last Sunday looked like eclipsing all previous torments. All week, there had been an assumption that the hard work had been done with the wins over United and Newcastle, that the QPR assignment was a formality, that there was no way in the world City were going to fall at the last fence having travelled all these miles.
This thesis was lent plenty of weight by City’s unbelievably impressive record on home soil (17 wins, one draw, no defeats) as well as QPR’s considerable inadequacies. Yes, there would be tension in the air for as long as it remained scoreless, but an early goal would surely arrive sooner or (in the worst-case scenario) later, after which it would be party-time all the way. 5-0, maybe, with the visitors possibly managing to keep the score down to three or four if Paddy Kenny was having one of his better days.
The only problem with this script was its complete ignorance of City’s preposterous tragi-comic history, the club’s unshakeable magnificence at coming up with new and endlessly creative methods of senseless self-destruction, the complete born-under-a-bad-sign curse that was (and apparently always would be) City’s lot in life, the natural order of things, in starkly vivid contrast to United’s long-established tradition of being smiled upon by the fates to a ridiculous extent.
And as the week progressed, Foul Play’s confidence, based on entirely legitimate footballing reasons, began to waver a little, giving way at about midday on Sunday to this hideous chill, a sudden terror that this might be one of those days when the referee or the woodwork or sheer poxy rotten luck got in the way.
And sure enough, with the guts of 40 minutes gone, the scoreline remained at 0-0 while the Red Devils were doing the business over at Sunderland. Nor were City exactly carving out heaps of chances. The general nervousness was clearly conveying itself to the players. Then, just when one began to think the unthinkable, Pablo Zabaleta’s less-than-unstoppable strike was horribly mishandled by Paddy Kenny, and the breakthrough had been made. Half-time; 1-0; not yet time to pop any champagne corks, but one could at least breathe a little easier.
How horrific was that second half? How shocking was Joleon Lescott’s defending for the equaliser? How unbelievably, tragically, piteously City-esque was it to suddenly propel themselves into a situation of being 2-1 down at home to relegation candidates on the biggest day in the club’s history? How many chances had we carved out? (35, as it turns out). Even now, the memory remains unspeakably harrowing.
I know that the feeling of absolute gut-wrenching, pit-of-the-stomach horror which engulfed me as the second half wore on was far worse than anything football has ever subjected me to (with the possible exception of Thierry Henry’s handball in 2009).
Roberto Mancini clearly wasn’t enjoying it a whole lot either, appearing to morph into Basil Fawlty as the carnage unfolded, sinking to his knees and doubtless offering up pleas to a higher power. But no use. It just wasn’t happening.
A couple of hundred miles to the north-east, we knew that United had far too much savvy to fuck things up against Sunderland, and with QPR defending as if their lives depended on it (which, in footballing terms, they did) the 90 minutes came.... and went.... without salvation as a gobsmacked, stupefied crowd wept openly, many of them already streaming for the exits.
There is no way that pen, paper or word processor can do justice to what unfolded in those final four minutes of stoppage time. Comparisons have been made to United’s Nou Camp miracle of 1999, and to Michael Thomas’ last-gasp strike for Arsenal ten years earlier. But this was worlds removed: those clubs had a tradition of actually winning things. This was Clark Kent transforming into Superman, caterpillar becoming butterfly, the mere mortal sprouting wings.
I didn’t actually physically levitate and start to fly when Aguero’s 95th-minute bullet flew into the net, but I am told by reliable witnesses that I sprinted around the office with a demented fury reminiscent of Marco Tardelli’s World Cup victory dance in 1982, my usual articulacy giving way to a primal ‘AAAARRRGGGHHHH’ or words to that general effect, before the final whistle blew amid scenes of utter bedlam and I just sort of slumped speechless back into my desk, too shattered to speak, too transfixed by the enormity of what I had just witnessed to do anything other than sit there and let it slowly, gradually, brilliantly, beautifully sink in. Champions. Manchester fucking City. Still doesn’t sound right, does it?
24 hours on, the euphoria is intense, the afterglow is in no danger of subsiding, and I suspect it never really will. City still have Europe and beyond to conquer, but it’s hardly excessive to state that there will almost certainly never be another day quite like that. This has been a year of pure sporting Paradise, with Dublin’s All-Ireland triumph having followed a not dissimilar script, as if to illustrate exactly why we persist through the hard times.
I am, as you may be aware, bound for Poland in a month’s time where it is hoped we might witness similarly joyous scenes, but right now I can’t think of any way on earth Trap’s troops could possibly trump the events of last weekend, unless we were to stage a recovery from 2-0 down in the Final against England and seize the day 3-2 deep into stoppage time with a Maradona-style slalom run from Robbie or Damien or whoever.
It sounds a tad unlikely. But, given the way 2011/12 has unfolded thus far, I’m starting to half-expect it.
Football. Fucking hell.