But at what point does the exceptional become routine? At what stage does this carefully choreographed supremacy start to leave people a little cold?Įven before City kick off in Istanbul, there are some for whom this point has already been reached.
Should City complete the Treble against Inter Milan, you sense the feat would not be an outlier, that it would intensify their desire for a repeat next year, and the year after, for as long as the insatiable Pep Guardiola chooses to stay. What was once a masochistic passion is now a project, a pursuit of domination on a scale the game has never witnessed. Their presence brings a nostalgia for a more precarious age.įor the club they survey now is unrecognisable. You can still hear Paul Dickov, scorer of the famous equaliser against Gillingham, offering punditry for the in-house TV station. You can still find Shaun Goater, cult hero of that benighted era, working as the youth coach. It is not as if City have disowned this chapter, when they had to claw their way back up from the third tier. Seriously, their club, masters of tragicomic haplessness, would be the envy of the world? They were barely even the envy of Didsbury back then. Had you prophesied this to a City supporter in the late Nineties, you would have drawn hoots of derision. About the closest to a shock result was the 1-1 draw in Leipzig, an aberration soon corrected in the return leg with a 7-0 pulverising. For City, the story has been one of bludgeoning power, with those twin behemoths Bayern Munich and Real Madrid simply bulldozed aside. In United’s European campaign, there were multiple instances where you detected the glory ebbing away: not just in the Champions League final, which they trailed for 85 minutes, but also in the semi-final, which required Roy Keane’s totemic, self-sacrificing display against Juventus to send them to Barcelona in the first place. If there is one fundamental contrast between this all-conquering City team and Manchester United’s class of 1999, it is the absence of jeopardy. Now here they were, chanting “two down, one to go”, zeroing in on the Treble as if it were a fate divinely decreed.
Twenty-four years earlier, some of these fans had made the same pilgrimage for the less alluring spectacle of a League One play-off final, when they only squeaked past Gillingham on penalties. Walking back along Wembley High Road last Saturday, through Manchester City’s designated drinking zone after the FA Cup final, the thought occurred as to whether any club had advanced so far, so fast.
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