Pre-Match Prattle
This will be my first home match since Villa back in December. Much has been said about the backroom problems at City but it hasn’t affected their performance on the pitch in the last week as they’ve won twice. We haven’t beaten them for ages but so what? We hadn’t beaten Spurs away for ages and that didn’t stop us. Hart has got a lot of praise for his penalty-saves on Thursday while recently resigned Shaun Wright-Phillips will be a handful. I was impressed by Carluka in Euro 2008 and reckon we could have done a lot worse than sign him. Cisse will be starting again and will be wanting to show City what they’ve missed out on and Malbranque is out but other than that our line-up at this point, 9 a.m. Sunday, is unclear. I was chatting to a Liverpool fan last night and he said Cisse won’t play when the weather turns cold and that he didn’t rate him at all. Speaking of weather, the papers are warning of a monsoon this afternoon and if that happens, it’s bound to play its part in the match. Come rain or shine, I fancy us to win 2-1.

The Match
After a couple of ciders in Fitzgerald’s I was in the ground and in my seat in the East Stand right on the half-way line by 2.50. The crowd looked surprisingly thin but apart from that all seemed well and when the teams were announced Malbranque was playing after all. The first half was okay for about forty-five minutes but after that everything went horribly wrong. We had the better of the attacking play without creating any gilt-edged chances but City coped with whatever we could throw at them without much difficulty and they looked dangerous on the break. There was a lot of nice build-up play from Richardson and Reid in particular while Diouf back-heeled it to good effect more than our entire team has done in the last decade. However, in injury-time we must have been already in that dressing-room as we allowed City to stroll down the right and cross for Ireland to put them 1-0 up at the worst possible moment.

Still, at the break my friends and I rallied ourselves and reckoned we could still win it 2-1, which was the general forecast. The second-half was a different story and frankly we were dire. Shaun Wright-Phillips had looked dangerous whenever he had the ball in the first-half and in the second he ran rings round poor Nos scoring in the 50 th and 59 th minutes to put the game way beyond us. On the hour Keano responded with a triple substitution of Murphy, Stokes and Healy for Leadbitter, Diouf and Cisse but this turned out to be a very bad move as whereas before that Diouf and Cisse were at least putting themselves about all over the shop and playing some attractive football without really threatening the City goal, afterwards there was zilch in the way of shots on target apart from one tame effort by Healy in the 90 th minute and very little attractive football.

City deserved their win and apart from some good midfield play we were horribly ineffective. It was like a throwback to the worst performances of last season.

Enough said, except of course that we were all completely soaked on the way to the Royalty as the monsoon finally hit us. Shame it hadn’t arrived about an hour earlier as we may have had to abandon the game. We need these two weeks off to have a very good think.

ALS Books click here