Big-Sixaphobia

Manchester is an easy city to love. Music, football, all the art, culture and grand architecture that the 19th Century cotton barons could muster. I moved there a couple of years after the turn of the millennium, just after we’d had one of those brief single season rivalries, which burn furiously for a few months but are basically meaningless, as we've had with Plymouth, Sheffield Wednesday and Leeds recently. That never stopped me having a lot of time for City fans and I made a few trips to watch Cit-eh. I always rate people that find themselves hooked on the less successful team in their conurbation, as City fans did for most of the twentieth century. Falling in love with flaws as well as charms is, in my view, a sign of emotional depth.I’ve always felt connected to Manchester, so it's sad there's so little to say about the actual game. I have a couple of close friends who are life-long Sky Blues and it would have been great to talk about two teams that hadn’t been separated by a billion pounds spent over two decades. One of them, Harry, loved City enough to work a couple of City players into his wedding vows, quoting Paolo Wanchope saying of Ali Bernarbia, “he sees us before we see ourselves”, which is easily the most romantic sentiment ever expressed in a post-match interview. I watched Saturday’s game with another City fan, Mark, of long enough standing to remember Paul Dickov's 95th-minute equaliser at Wembley in 1999 to take City into extra time and ultimately back into the second tier. He's a kind, warm-hearted man, and was generous enough not to take the piss as some fairly calamitous goals flew in.

The game itself felt like Raul Julia’s scene-chewingly brilliant monologue as M. Bison in Street Fighter: The Movie. “For you the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me? It was Tuesday.”

I got the feeling there wasn't much intensity to Mark’s football emotions these days in any case. Mark gave up his season ticket not long after the Aguero miracle title win in 2012 and confessed that almost all of the joy in winning trophies had long since been squeezed out, replaced by just the mild hit of schadenfreude from watching Liverpool, Arsenal and United fail. I measure that against the elation I felt when we liberated ourselves from League One or when Jeremy Sarmiento toed the ball into Southampton's net and it's no life really. "We see things they'll never see" as City's most famous fans sang.

Wasted pity I'm sure. The young City fan knows nothing different, the older ones don't need me to tell them something has been lost. What are you supposed to do when someone with wealth beyond all imagination purchases something integral to your soul. Just let them have it as a matter of principle?

I'm an old-school socialist and all my recent joy was purchased by whatever investment some ruthless US capitalists could bring to bear, so who am I to talk? There are no Saints in modern football. It is what it is. There are lines, of course. An investor isn't an authoritarian dictatorship and accepting what you can't change is different from becoming a full-time advocate for the monsters. Yet, we’re all still playing in the same muck. All this preamble is a long way round to (again) not really knowing what to say about the game. I could dwell on the, very real, irritation that I felt at having surrendered so easily and unnecessarily. We were a 37-1 shot to win at kick off with one bookmaker, an implied 2.7% chance of victory. That 2.7% possibility lay almost entirely through scoring a faultless goal in transition and defending it with our lives. We did the first thing, but then seemed to get far too up in our feelings to do the second thing. Leif Davis' impetuous tackle on Savinho was that of a man who had his inner voice screaming "fucking hell, we're beating Manchester City!" at maximum volume. He should have let him get to the byline and spam a cross in.We unravelled for a further 5 minutes in a manner than Manchester City really didn’t require of us. I hope Aro Muric's self-confidence is made of the same adamantium that Vas Hladky's is, because the second was a real howler. Not a being-brave-misjudged-a-pass error, but a what-the-hell-were-you-thinking screw up. Move on quick dear boy because we need a sweeper style keeper and you're it. Those prone to worry will ask whether Leif Davis' defensive decision making might be more of a problem now he's not regularly parked on the shoulder of the opposition right back. They could ponder whether goalkeepers recover from nightmare starts (they do, ask Christian Walton and Vaclav Hladky). They might ask whether our back four will ever get the hang of “standing in an actual bloody line”.

But ultimately it's churlish to worry too much about any of that. Not only are Manchester City singular opponents - no bottom half team took a single point at the Etihad last season – but by the end of the window we'll have had so many players come in it almost seems irrelevant what bones we can pick collectively or individually with what we’ve seen so far. We’ve learned little about our fate. We were never staying up with points won from City or Liverpool. It is unlikely we'll see Saturday's line-up again. We have almost certainly transitioned from "are this lot good enough to step up?" to "how quickly can McKenna get his new-look team functional?" as the key question. I asked, before the Liverpool game, whether I'd enjoy Van Dijk's imperious defending or Haaland's clinical finishing. Well, the answer is a definitive no. I'm already sick of games where we lose and I have to shrug my shoulders at the inevitability of it. I’ve never been one to feel much thrill at who we get to share the pitch with or derive much pleasure from being patronised by the likes of Arne Slot and Pep Guardiola (“So so special”). How many more of these? I browsed seventeenth-placed Nottingham Forest’s matches last season for clues and reckoned about twelve of them were no-contests in terms of chances of created. Ten more to go then, I guess.

Roll on the visit of Fulham (still the third-hardest league fixture we’ve had in more than two decades) and some more “business is usual” vibes, rather than this “delighted to make my Premier League debut!” stuff.