A league and a cup in his first season, and second place in his second, doesn’t look like it’s going to be enough to save Manuel Pellegrini from the chop this summer as English football continues to eat itself.
Nineteen years ago, almost to the day, Manchester City were relegated from the Premier League following a 2-2 draw at home to Liverpool on the final day of the season. That, you may recall, the day they fought back from two goals down to level the game with ten minutes left for play, only to spend that ten minutes holding the ball in the corner of the field to waste time believing a draw would be good enough. It wasn’t.
At the time that was seen as fairly typical of a club known for its farcical, accident-prone nature. Manchester City were like the goofy hero of a series of children’s books, each tale of mistake and misadventure designed to teach the kids how not to live their own lives or run their own football clubs.
Amazingly, considering they were one of the biggest clubs in the second tier at that time and perennial favourites to make an immediate return to the top flight each year, and that it would be hard to concoct such a ridiculous situation again if you tried, they managed to surpass that nonsense and inflict a further relegation on themselves two years later.
QPR were the beneficiaries that day, visiting Maine Road needing to avoid defeat in order to stave off their own demotion, City requiring a victory to leapfrog the R’s and survive themselves. Rangers, as we know, tend to approach such cut-throat, do-or-die, blood and thunder games with all the aggression, conviction and hopes of success as the local Tory candidate knocking doors on a Scottish council estate. Typically, the London side came bearing gifts by way of a free kick, dispatched into the net by Geo Kinkladze, after barely 30 seconds of play.
But City contrived to mess up even that gilt edged opportunity, against one of the worst QPR sides in living memory. First goalkeeper Martyn Margetson picked up a back-pass enabling Kevin Gallen to set up Mike Sheron for an equaliser from an indirect free kick. And then Jamie Pollock entered stage right, chipped a bouncing ball over his own defender with one touch, and then lobbed the advancing keeper with a header that bounced gently into the unguarded net. I can remember that moment, I can see it clear as day, feeling like I was actually in control of another human, like my every wish was coming true, like he was obeying my every command. It was an extraordinary passage of play. Typical City. Another 2-2, and another relegation.
Now I’m not trotting all this out to prove that City are some piddly, insignificant village club, inflated grossly beyond their natural size and level on the whim of one rich idiot. Yes, Pollock’s moment of genius — for which he won the University of California’s Man of the Millennium award ahead of Jesus Christ and Karl Marx after some early internet hijacking by QPR fans — meant they were playing league fixtures against Wrexham, Walsall and Macclesfield Town 17 years ago but the attendances for those fixtures (27,677; 24,291; 31,086) speak for themselves. There has always been the potential and the fan base here for, if not a league championship-winning club, certainly one of the top-ten clubs in this country. This isn’t a Wigan, Rushden and Diamonds or Gretna situation we’re talking about here.
Nor am I making out like City being properly shit more than a decade ago means they should forever be humble, grateful and silent whenever they’re anything less than properly shit for the rest of time. Clubs come and go, expectations and performance levels rise and fall. If City were losing 4-0 in the Premier League every week, it wouldn’t be acceptable just because on this day in 1998 they were losing 2-1 at York City. That’s the same sort of logic Harry Redknapp was applying last season, making out QPR (who spent £108.3m across their 12 months in the Championship last year) shouldn’t be automatically expected to beat Huddersfield Town because Huddersfield Town are, quote, "good team, former league champions, big club.” Huddersfield Town haven’t won the league since Adolf Hitler was in short trousers (1926) and I’m pretty sure their supporters don’t hold them to those standards any more.
When you spend a billions pounds on a football team, as City’s owners certainly have when transfer fees, agent fees, signing on fees and wages are taken into account, expectations rise in line with that. It is a perfectly reasonable question to ask why Chelsea, so palpably off City’s pace last season, have been able to overtake them and claim the league title with the ease they have this season. Why, when Chelsea were adding Cesc Fabregas and Diego Costa to their line up, were City only bringing Fernando and Mangala from Porto? Fernando who is so similar in looks, pace, position and plodding style to the Fernandinho they already had you struggle to see the point. Mangala who is to Premier League defending as Katie Hopkins is to the human race. Why the malaise? Why the resting on laurels? Why has Wilfried Bony, added for £30m in January, gone from the Premier League’s top marksmen to a leggy, bit-part, non-scoring substitute in the six months since?
These are justifiable questions. What’s harder to countenance is the level of criticism that has gone the way of Manchester City, and particularly their manager Manuel Pellegrini, in a season when they have finished second and gone as far as ever before in the Champions League. Why is Pellegrini, a dignified gentleman who won the League and League Cup in his first season with City, his first year managing in England, now seen as a dead man walking? It’s not been as good a season as last year by a long chalk, and there have been moments where City appeared rudderless and adrift, but this idea that a total overhaul of the team, and a new manager, is required seems a little premature.
There was a time when having a millionaire owner guaranteed you success. Jack Walker was able to turn Blackburn Rovers, a provincial, small-town club with a small support, into the champions of England ahead of Manchester United, Liverpool, Everton, Arsenal and all the rest of them with the sort of money clubs now spend on a single player. Chris Sutton for £5m, David Batty for £2.7m, Alan Shearer for £3.6m — at the time we all stood by like the naysayers of Stephenson’s Rocket, predicting everybody’s heads were going to explode. But, as time has gone on, now every Premier League club has a multi-millionaire owner and, as Tony Fernandes and QPR know only too well, three teams still get relegated at the end of the year regardless.
To really cut through and challenge now you need a multi-billionaire owner. Even Arsenal, with everything they have going for them, struggle to keep up without one. City have Sheikh Mansour but he’s not the only blank cheque in town, Chelsea have Roman Abramovic and only one of them can win the league. Last year it was City, this year it’s Chelsea. Next year it could be City again, couple of Fabregas and Costa-type signings this summer and they could be running away with it again next year with Pellegrini at the helm. In this oh so terrible season after which players must be sold and managers dismissed they’ve still scored 71 goals — more than anybody else in the division.
Not for the first time this season, I’m drawn to a comment from Jamie Carragher who said English football is now at a stage that Spanish and Italian football reached a decade ago, and a decade ago we used to look out across Europe and laugh. Laugh at the turnover of managers and the ridiculously harsh reasons for their dismissals, laugh at the rapid-fire transfer of players, laugh at the way they always believed the grass was greener on the other side, laugh at the way they seemed to always believe eternal success was just one more manager and six new signings away and smugly admire our own stability and serene calmness.
Now we’re every bit as bad and it’s another reason the sport in this country is so dislikeable at the moment. That and the Gazprom adverts.
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