Hello Blues hope you enjoyed today if you were lucky enough to get soaked in the City centre.
By and large a pretty pleasant day with mostly wonderful interactions with fellow Sky Blues living the dream.
Started off bumping into an elderly fan called Ian wearing the short sleeve blue shirt with centre logo from early 70s. Ian was in town with an old school photographers bag as he was taking pictures. We laughed by saying we couldn't win the Champion's League without putting us fans through the wringer!
Anyway met up with my brother and his teenagers and decided to wait to get to the stage area. Everyone queued up chatting pleasantly to each other. It started getting busier and more packed. People started pushing their way to the front where the gates were.
My brother in a 70s League Cup shirt and Portugal bucket hat directly helped one wheelchair fan and his family get hopefully slightly early access.
Everyone was reasonably good natured but like I say many people decided to push in for best vantage points. Also, and apologies if I sound a right miserable twat(!) but in crowds with plenty of young kids around, why do people feel the need to smoke cigs, vapes and weed? Really fucked me off and it's just cunts behaviour. Sorry for the rant!
They kept delaying opening the the gates, due to long anticipated thunder storms. When the gates were opened, it was utterly chaotic, a complete free for all. It could easily have been a stampede I know slot of people were distressed and plenty of scrotes were taking liberties in the disabled section. Again plenty of people were jibbing in, I got a few elbows a la Jamie fking vardy!
However the periodic and rather heavy downpours kept me calm as at times I felt really dizzy after being stood up for so many hours.
Loved Natalie Pike City are very lucky to have her, a natural presenter. The atmosphere improved when everybody started joining in with the songs. It would have been great to have seen much more of the parade rather than brief snippets. Anyway I achieved my 15 seconds of fame whilst the camera's panned for Wonderwall.
Was utterly electric once the players arrived, everyone got their song. Noticeable that the most popular were El Pep, Super Jackie Grealish, Rodri and Erl. Shame they didn't have any legends there during the presentations, but did do a few nice interviews with Lakey and Dickov. Anyway loved the confetti and pyrotechnics. Like I say it could all have been better organized by opening the gates earlier and having any sort of queue management in place.
My feet were numb by the end, don't know how I made it to Station Approaches for my bus stand. Nice atmosphere there with plenty of guys starting songs. Anyway I spoke to two people heading to Denton, a fair haired lady and a young lad from Gorton, Anthony who had a fine full Chris Bonnington style beard in I think 215 or 216. Lovely people!
Anyway I was told that there should be some very positive announcements on Bernie and Gundo this week, apparently from no lesser person than Twixy himself! Apparently the man with biscuit covered in caramel and chocolate is working full speed on bringing a Laporte replacement in. Don't think this makes me an In the Know as I know fuck all.
Another gripe, they'd known there was the possibility of a victory parade on this date for a while. Why didn't they plan for the extra thousands of fans who were in town late. Buses were pretty poor and the trams were heaving too.
Anyway hope everyone enjoyed the day and thanks for bearing with me!
