Actually, I have no problem at all with 'gloryhunters'. I openly welcome any and all City fans whether they discovered us in 1932 or 2011. It matters not, here we are a single family and a single voice willing on a team and more than that, an entire Club to fulfill both our and their ambitions of becoming successful. If they are posting regularly on here or any other site about City, then they are absolutely good enough for me. It shows an obsession that we can all relate to, a shared passion that we can all express.
However, I absolutely despise some people who come on here who are not City fans. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with Liverpool, United or any other clubs fans coming on here, identifying themselves as such and posting. Whilst we may hold their individual clubs in contempt, we appreciate that they also have their footballing passion for their club like we do for ours. Bluemoon policy in practice is to treat them as guest in our home. If they want to come and have a chat then they are more than welcome to. If they pop round, tell you that you make a shit brew, have a crap carpet and your hedge needs cutting, we throw them out of the site as anybody would throw them out of their house.
This little "house" on the internet is populated by City fans and any fans who come to try and purposely upset the population are sharply dispatched.
My problem though, is with a certain subsection of fans. These are fans who are exploiting our system and working in the darkness and loopholes. They are the "temporary City fans" who are here purely because their favourite player is here. They share no love or passion for this club, no more than they have a love or passion for a train station that they stop at on a journey. Thus, they are neither opposition fans nor City fans and can get away with absolutely slating the club, players and management without any problem. They get the benefits of being a City fan without actually being a City fan. They are the termites that live in the house, eating it from within and moving on once their colony moves on.
More to the point, they make the forum fucking impossible to post on at times. I've literally just stopped writing anything about football on here now simply because of how many eggshells we have to take, lest we make anything that isn't viewed as a 100% positive comment about one of their idols. Here's an example. After the last game, I put this innocuous comment in the post match thread:
Dzeko still poor, not clinical and almost no ability to control a ball to feet. His timing was also way off, he broke down two counter attacks with how long he dwelled on the ball. He might have scored one, but Aguero would have had a hattrick today.
Toure was so bad that we had to bring Milner on just to help him.
Apart from that, pretty much happy days. Tevez was excellent but a special mention for Rodwell, who was my MOTM by far. Silva showed signs of being back to his best, Nasri did his job, and it was great to see Razak get some minutes under his belt.
There are some problems to address during the break, but we're doing ok.
I was immediately jumped on by the "temporary City" fan club, but that's fine as I was willing to back up the point I was challenged on using statistics
He passed directly to the opposition on 9 occasions. That's not an exaggeration, it's the documented figures. He was tackled and lost possession on 4 separate occasions. He lost the ball due to poor control on 3 separate occasions. By my math, that's 16 times in the game that he lost possession.
No player who loses possession in the game 16 times can be said to have had a "fantastic game". His pass accuracy was 10% lower than every other outfield player on the team. It was 12% lower than his strike partner. It was 15% below the team average.
As a decent comparison, it was 18% below Robin Van Persie's against Fulham last week.
And he wasn't "brilliant on the counter". On the three occasions that he gained the ball on a counter attack, he held up the ball far too long and slowed us down resulting in their being no point of having a counter attack.
Last season, Dzeko lost the ball due to poor control more than any other player in the entire squad. 54 times in 16 starts and 14 sub appearances. I repeat, this is just from poor control. He lost the ball due to poor passing and getting tackled too.
2 pretty normal Bluemoon posts, especially in the post-match thread where the performance of players from the game IS THE ENTIRE POINT. It's what we made the thread for. Literally, it's the point of it.
This then prompted a
53 PAGE THREAD started by his fan club declaring that Dzeko was being bullied by City fans and that we should leave him alone. 53 page thread that sucked in regular members into an argument that didn't need to happen because a non-City fan decided that he didn't like people who went to watch Dzeko live commenting on his performance then using facts to back this up. From this spawned another thread in which Edin vs Mario was the topic, another massive thread that sucked regular members into bitching and has resulted in a couple of reports. Don't get me wrong, I'm not bothered about discussing these things, but the polarising influence that the "fan clubs" have to this site is bullshit.
I used to take an ambivalent and even positive stance on this, but I've gotten more and more sick of it as the months have rolled by. We've had Tevez fans, Balo fans, Dzeko fans, and the like come onto the forum and literally cause arguments because somebody dare have the absolute cheek to say something that was derogatory to their hero.
As I say, I do want to stress that two City fans arguing on here about a player or whatever is completely different to a City fan and a non-City fan which is completely different to a "fan club" fan versus a City fan.
The internet is not a small place. It's pretty much infinite. I see no reason why we should have to put up with this disruptive shit every single week, because one player plays for us.
