I've still not recovered from the emotional gut-punch of Shaun Wright-Phillips leaving in the summer of 2005. I know that £21m saved the club in the long run but I was 11 years old and fucking devastated.
I was down in London with my parents and we were staying at a hotel in Pimlico (I think). Obviously this was in the days before smartphones and 4G and whatnot, and the hotel we were staying in was a proper cheap one so we only had terrestrial TV in the rooms, so the best way to get news was to wait for the morning papers to arrive in the lobby. Picked up the Express and there it was on the back page, "Jose gets his man", or words to that effect.
My world stopped and the whole holiday was ruined. I wore my Wright-Phillips 29 shirt (the red and black one from the Keegan years) all day out of a misplaced sense of pride and even had a grown-up Chelsea fan laugh in my face about Shaun while walking round Madame Tussauds.
Finding out years later, when he was at QPR, that he'd never wanted to leave in the first place, was really upsetting. I'm glad a player of his quality has a couple of Premier League titles in his trophy cabinet, because my god he deserved them, but knowing he would have been happy staying with City throughout the Stuart Pearce years warmed my heart as much as it broke it.
In a way, though, in full hindsight, I'm glad he went to Chelsea when he did because it meant we got to see him again years later. If he'd stayed another year, which would have meant a full year in that Pearce team, he might have only gone to Spurs or Arsenal for £15-20m and actually been of some use to them. He might have stayed there longer and gone to QPR without ever coming back to City first.
I still vividly remember the day he came back. I'd just turned 14 and was staying on a campsite in Wales. I was sitting in the car waiting out a rain shower while my parents read the newspaper in our tent, passing the hours by flicking between Radio 1 and Radio 5Live. There had been rumblings about Shaun coming back but we were mostly cut off from the news, save for the car radio and a little village newsagents down the road that got precisely 20 copies of The Mirror and The Mail delivered and no more. If you got there past 8am they were gone and you had to wait another day for updates on anything going on in the world.
Then the 5Live bulletin came through mid-afternoon that Shaun was coming home. I opened the door and leapt out the car in a single motion and sprinted two full laps of the campsite screaming my head off. If you'd asked me that day how City were going to go on that season I'd have said we were on to win the league.
I have clearer memories of that day than the Sheikh's takeover. That's how much Shaun meant to me as a kid watching a shite City team one with one genuine diamond in it. Of all the players who were part of that 2011 team that won the FA Cup, I was happiest for Shaun. A real reminder of the (sporadic) good times from the pre-takeover "old City" years who deserved to play a part in the first era of the revival.