If you are in four tournaments you have to rotate. Story. End of. Could we possibly abstain from absolutely crucifying Rodwell and Micah just for a bit? Unless you are one of the best players in the world, like Sergio — and they are not up there and never will be — any player needs playing time to get up to his top level. Micah's been more or less out for more than a year. Rodwell has rarely played for us. Pellegrini put them in because he thought it was a relatively low-risk game. Alright, he was wrong. That's the beauty of the F.A. Cup, that's why Sunderland beat Leeds United to win it all those years ago (I was at the match, as it happens). But the entire team was poor for forty five minutes, they met a team playing out of their skins, and Pellegrini did something about it.
What's much, much more important. I spent all day Sunday thinking about this result. In my sober opinion — sober in all senses of the word — it just might signify that we are on the brink of the most momentous season in the history of this club. Crazy, I hear you say? Let me explain. You're a professional footballer. You're in four tournaments. You're maybe playing twice a week, for weeks on end, in some cases. That's not counting stupid international friendlies which you don't have the right to bow out of. Whether consciously or not, you prioritise. It's only human. We won the Cup three seasons back, we were in the final last season. You might just have a thought in the back of your mind, "O.K., Barcelona next month, Chelsea coming up, etc. etc. Maybe we just might pass on this one and it wouldn't be a disaster for this club". I'm having to express it clunkily, and I don't think many footballers consciously formulate it that way. I say, it's just a thought, a very human one, right in the back of their mind. It's what you do at work when you've got the boss up your backside and you've got three jobs to get completed by midday. Now what's important is this: I don't know what Pellers said to them, I can't seeing him raising his voice somehow — he's not a Ferguson-type bully — but I can see him being witheringly sarcastic (Nasri said as much in his recent BBC interview). Then they went out there with two natural leaders — Zab and Komps — and they said, "Fuck it, we don't want to lose this or anything else. We're City. We don't do losing". Now that is something beyond talent, which we've know we've got masses of, more than anyone else in the PL, hands down. It's iron. It's iron in the soul. It is what the Liverpool team of the late 70s and early 80s had, and, although, it hurts me to say it, it's what the rags had for about twenty years. You cannot buy that. Money won't do it. Not the Sheik's, not anyone else's. If it is the case that that iron is in the process of being instilled into those players — Mancini contributed to that, Pellegrini is taking it forward beautifully, in a different way — then yes, the unthinkable is now becoming thinkable to me. We may, just may, be able to lift those four trophies, or at least three of them.
Phew! Enough, already. But one last thing. From what I could gather, the crowd were, at last, playing twelth man. Gotta be every time. That will count, too, in the realisation of the impossible dream.
