Tag: Chelsea

Back In The Summer Of ’89 – Manchester, 23rd of October, 2011

Everybody’s talking about The Stone Roses as United are bookies’ favourites and about to play City. After a promising start by United, City run riot and are 3-0 up before United score a great goal to give some faint hope. It’s all in vain as City attack again in waves before winning comfortably, 5-1. This is a memory of mine from September 1989, a memory I never thought I’d see repeated, but today, it’s even worse. At least when City won 5-1 in 1989, it was at Maine Road, today, they’ve won 6-1 at Old Trafford.

Nearly two months ago, I watched United give Arsenal the same kind of thrashing I watched City give United today. Before today’s game, the word on the quiet from my red brethren was a draw would be a good result due to the obvious fact that City are playing well and United, despite good recent results, are not.

Since City beat Tottenham 5-1 at White Hart Lane, there’s been all kinds of talk about how this could be their year. My belief has been that City have not played any team that they shouldn’t beat since then and I was waiting to see how they’d get on against teams like Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool or United. Today they gave a pretty good answer. Knowing City fans the way I do, they’ll already be out in the satellite towns of Manchester (despite all their talk, you won’t see many City fans in Piccadilly Gardens tonight) celebrating winning the title, like last season, before the clocks went back. This City team certainly can but there’s a long way to go ’til next May. As things stand, United are twelve goals & five points behind City, today’s a bad loss but we’ve all seen United recover bigger deficits than this.

On a personal note, I’m writing this an hour after the game, the result hasn’t yet truly sunk in, all I know for sure is City deserved the win. One thing I’ve gotta say in fairness to City fans is that for the first time in my years of watching derby matches, not once did I hear any mention, celebration or singing about the Munich air crash. Whether this is down to them now having a good team and thus not feeling the need to celebrate a tragedy or whether it’s down to the deserved slapping some of their fans got on Wembley Way or the motorway services last April, I don’t know but it was refreshing not to hear it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfli1kBWwBo

United started the game with plenty of possesion and aggression but, despite that, I never thought at any time that City were under any pressure. Ballotelli’s goal was just too easy and when Jonny Evans got sent off in the opening minutes of the second half, I could feel a long afternoon coming on. With City three up on seventy minutes, United went into a kamikaze attacking mode without actually looking like scoring. The understanbly boisterous City fans were quietened with ten minutes to go when Darren Fletcher scored. City fans know from plenty of past experience that if any team could come back from 3-0 down, it’s United and there was a nervous quiet amongst the City fans’ section, just to my right but whilst United kept on trying, City’s defence were just too disciplined to be rattled. I believed when Fletcher scored that it was only at best a face saver, in the end, with three City goals in injury time, it wasn’t even that.

The Lawman And The Mercenary.

I was watching Denis Law last Saturday being interviewed on Football Focus, generally reminiscing about his days as a pro-footballer and drawing the inevitable comparisons with the lifestyles and living conditions that pro-footballers live in today. Two things mentioned regarding the treatment of his knee injury in the 1960s by doctors and the brinksmanship over a demanded £10.00 a week pay rise, which resulted in him being transfer listed by Sir Matt Busby, brought modern events into stark comparison. Specifically Owen Hargreaves recent comments over the treatment of his knee injury during the last three years of his lamentably injury plaugued time at United and Carlos Tevez’s alleged refusal to come off the subs bench on Tuesday night in the Allianz Arena in Munich.

Hargreaves claimed he was being used as a guinea pig during his injury by the medical staff employed by United, whether Hargreaves is right or wrong is not for me to say due to my lack of expertise in the treatment of knee injuries but if he has any complaints about his treatment, he wants to listen to Laws story about knee injury treatments in the 1960s to get some perspective, particularly when Law said he felt like his knee was being treated by “butchers”.

In an era when the word legend is overused, Denis Law is a legend in the old fashioned sense of the word. A bigger folk hero to the hearts and minds of United fans, you’d struggle to find. The original king of the Stretford end, he’s so popular at Old Trafford that he’s revered as much for his reaction to a goal he scored at in the Scoreboard end of Old Trafford against an already relegated United side in 1974 which just compounded it, as for any other deed of his during his time at Old Trafford. Along with Bobby Charlton, he’s probably the only United figurehead that could walk in and around City’s newly monikered stadium without getting abused.

Carlos Tevez is another ex United player who performed like a legend on the pitch when playing in red. A tigerish and mithering centre forward who never gives the best centre halves in the business a minutes peace. I’ve lost count of how many important goals he scored or created in a red shirt from where/what most people would call a lost cause. He was loved on the terraces and stands of Old Trafford, just like he was at his previous club, West Ham. When Tevez announced in June 2009 that he was leaving United, no United fan of my aquaintance was happy about hearing it. This was the second world class player United had lost in a couple of weeks after United had sold Christiano Ronaldo to Real Madrid for an eye popping £80,000,000. People were sorry but not surprised to see Ronaldo go, consensus was though that if the money paid by Real Madrid went towards signing Carlos Tevez permanently, then it’d be alright.

It didn’t, Tevez announced he was leaving United soon after and a few days after that, announced where he was going. Tevez had previously said that out of respect to United, he wouldn’t sign for our main rivals, Liverpool. It was a choice between City and Chelsea. Whilst amused at the unintended effects of his words, putting City firmly in their place, he went and signed for them. City fans were unsurprisingly ecstatic of signing Carlos Tevez from United. There was all kinds of talk of this being a seismic shift in the balance of power between the two Manchester clubs. These seismic shifts have been occuring on a bi-weekly basis since September 2008 in which time, United have won two titles and a league cup and City have won the FA Cup.  City fans with a nostrodamic foresight were singing, to the tune of “London bridge is falling down”, songs about Carlos Tevez and Munich on the day they signed him, they had him sussed all along.

Over the five years that Tevez has played in England, he has picked up a truly mind boogling amount of money in wages, to play for clubs and fans who worshiped him almost unconditionally and he has treated the fans of these clubs and the clubs themselves with an almost regal disdain, culminating in the incident in Munich on Tuesday night. Denis Law, as alluded to before, is an almost regal presence at Old Trafford. It’s an indictment of the warped realities of modern and old school football that a man who literally gave the lifelong wellbeing of his knees for Man United has, in the last twelve years released three autobiographies.

I’m not Denis Law’s accountant and thus, not privvy to his finances but the prolific nature of his autobiographical scribes tells me that he’s doing it for the need of money.  I just hope that the release of this book, obviously aimed at the Christmas stocking filler market, along with Paul Scholes and Gary Nevilles recent tomes flooding the market with United related books, yields enough money so that Denis can spend his dotage sitting in the garden, enjoying his grandkids or basically doing what the hell he wants to do and never having the need to do it again. Buy yourself the book, buy your father, granddad or uncle the book and buy your United mad kids, nieces and nephews the book, he’s a great man with an interesting story to tell.