All had a job to do, all knew what that job was, and all did it well. What a difference a manager makes.

Hell, don’t you just love football, and life in general, after a game like that?

What with injuries and illness taking its toll on our squad, there were a few changes.

Ming (with daft plastic mask)
Gards Brown O’Shea Colback
Larsson Vaughan Catts McLean
Sess Bendtner

No Balotelli, no Silva - the show-offs, and they played everything through the man mountain that is Toure. At least they filled the away end, and played football the way we’ve become accustomed to seeing them play it – very patient, maybe too patient without Balotelli to do the final clever bit. Their first corner was cleared and set Sess away, but Hart saved comfortably. Whenever City got in our faces, Brown was there to clear, but only for a while after he took an obvious knock. On came forgotten man Matt Killgallon to play an hour of the best football of his career. Maybe City were less than as urgent as they could have been, but our defence got their foot in first almost every time.

Gardner looked like he’d spent his life at right back, and Colback positioned himself really well to keep the ball back at half way. Ming pulled off a couple of decent saves, Hart didn’t have much to do in the first half, but we tried to get it forward and McLean was a willing outlet down the left. Maybe not the explosive impact of his debut, but his willingness to run at people is a refreshing thing in today’s game. After another comfortable Ming save, we broke with McLean. Seb, and Sess interchanging passes before Gardner fired in a cannonball that swerved a foot wide of the angle. So we were looking sort of OK, but with the players at City’s disposal (Silva on the bench for God’s sake) there was always the feeling that if they could be arsed they could do us some damage. Thankfully they couldn’t, and just kept giving it back to Toure.

No goals at the break, and that was fair enough. They took off the hopeless thug De Jong for Aguero (the man with the world’s worst father in law) but he fared little better in terms of getting shots in. So they got upset and replaced Nasri with Silva. Bugger, we thought, but maybe Mancini had enjoyed his New Year’s eve in Sunderland so much that he was happy to watch his hugely expensive team pass pass and pass again. We tried, when we got the chance, to break forward, and Sess looked to have been flattened a couple of times without reward. Bendtner was receiving a fair amount of the ball, but seemed intent on playing keepy-uppy rather than finding a team-mate, and we gradually fell back, allowing City far too much of the ball.

McLean followed up Gardner’s great tackle with a nice burst down the wing, which almost got us a chance, then MR o’ Neill brought on Ji for Bendtner. Great move, Martin, as Ji ran his little Korean socks off in the faces of the City defence. At this stage, we’d have been more than happy with a point, and M O’N sorted us out even further with Elmo on for Vaughan. Elmo kept himself wide, stretched the City midfield, and created a few holes for Sess to run into. To match the first half miss by Bendtner, Sess managed to poke an effort wide as we decided that hitting them on the break was out best option.

With three minutes added, I was with the rest of the crowd in celebrating a decent point well won, when McLean ran down the left and played it inside. Ji seemed to have taken the Bendtner option by tiddling about with the ball too much, but when he was forced wide by a nonchalant defence he squeezed a shot past Hart to produce the sort of scenes on the terraces that I thought were a thing of the past. I was up a row, down a row, and half way up the wall into the boxes. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.

Man of the Match? Yet another cracking game from Catts, another fine fill-in job at right back by Gardener, and a fine game by Killgallon. More of the usual from Sess, frustration by Bendnter, but for me the most effective man was McLean. A quiet spell in the middle, but a refreshing throwback to the days when wingers won games.

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