I didn’t stay for it.
Feel a bit sad about it but his last year was a load of turgid shit so I thought fuck it and went to the pub.
TBH, I was alarmed after we went from the controlled football under Mancini, to a manager who set us up 4-4-2, waited for the whistle to blow, & yelled "CHARGE"!!
We beat a newly promoted Swansea 4-0 at home in MP's first match, but we had little control throughout the game & it could've been 4-4 if Swansea had a decent striker.
Some fans loved the "taking the handbrake off" approach, but it left me cold because I knew this all out attack tactic wouldn't work at the highest level, & once the opposition figured us out, we'd suffer.
After Manuel's first season where he was an unknown quantity, so it proved... The PL had figured us out. I'll never forget losing at Wet Spam & Fat Sam saying he exploited the obvious weakness that many fans were constantly complaining about to win the game easily. But Pellegrini wouldn't change.
We had Zabaleta & Kolorov as our preferred FB's & Demechelis as a CB, but all three were as slow as a bunch of stoned slugs. Added to MP's insistence of playing Fernandinho with a wheezing Yaya in a midfield two, we were constantly being overrun on the counter.
Teams kept lumping balls over the top into the channels to a pair of whippet wingers on either side, who'd have the freedom of the pitch to either go for goal or pass to their greyhound striker mate gleefully waiting for a one-on-one in the middle.
It happened game after game, but yet there was never a change. Because of Pellegrini's perceived lack of tactical nous & UEFA's FFP restrictions, we went backwards after Mancini imo.
I'd received cast iron info in 2012 that Pep was lined up to replace Mancini, but City couldn't be seen to be sacking him after the Agueroooooo moment, hence Pep took a year off & went to Bayern.
It took Guardiola a season to properly assess where we were at after Pellegrini, but after spending £200m on a new defence in 2017, City have never looked back.
Good or bad, all managers have contributed to the colourful history, that the istree clubs reckon we don't possess.
