UlsterCitizen
Well-Known Member
Cant have Holt most of the time but.......................
A bitter wind blew through the Etihad Stadium last night as Manchester United’s grip on power weakened.
Sir Alex Ferguson zipped his jersey up to the neck and pulled his overcoat more tightly around him to try to keep it out.
He looked a little fragile for once, old as well as cold. And what he saw unfolding on the pitch must have chilled him to the bone.He is built differently from most of the rest of us. Defiance and self-belief rarely desert him.
He was fiery to the end last night, held back by the fourth official as he remonstrated with Roberto Mancini deep into the second half.
But a man who has bestrode our game for so long must have wondered if what he was seeing was quite simply the end.
The end of his side’s 20-year reign over English football, the end of the dominance he has built, the end of an era.
Because however scrappy this match was, however nervy and lacking in moments of inspiration and creativity, it felt as though it signalled a shift in the balance of power in English football.
Manchester City did not win the title with this victory over their silenced neighbours last night. But if they close out their season with wins at Newcastle and at home to QPR, they will clinch their first top-flight championship for 44 years.
This match was the gateway and now the momentum is with them.
It would be just like the old City to blow it at St James’ Park on Sunday, but this is not the old City any more. And even that fine United stalwart, Gary Neville, admitted that if Roberto Mancini’s side win the title this season, they may dominate the domestic game for years to come. That is the bigger question, really.
Was last night just a skirmish or was it the big battle. Was this Ferguson’s Waterloo?
It is always this way with periods of greatness at football clubs. It gets to a point where people thirst for the end of the cycle.
There is an often sub-conscious yearning for renewal and rebirth, for the favourites to fade and someone fresh to take their place.
It was like that with the great Liverpool teams of the 70s and 80s and it has been like that for some time now with Manchester United.
Ferguson first achieved his great ambition of knocking Liverpool off their perch in 1993 and he has been balancing on it ever since.
He has wobbled and flapped a few times, most notably when he became locked in a battle with United shareholders JP McManus and John Magnier over the racehorse, Rock of Gibraltar.
But in his remarkable quarter of a century at Old Trafford, Ferguson has won the Premier League 12 times, the FA Cup five times, the Double three times and the Treble once.
Arsene Wenger, Jose Mourinho and Carlo Ancelotti have all taken decent swipes at him. But he saw them off and swatted away a generation of his protégés and former players, too, men like Steve Bruce, Roy Keane and Gordon Strachan.
He has rebuilt his team time after time and one way or another, he and his club have remained in situ, waiting for the next great challenge.
And now the next great challenge is here and with it has come the extra ingredient of a city rivalry.
It is one thing being dethroned by a team from London, another altogether to be forced to pass the baton to a team patronised as United’s poor relations.
That increased the stakes for Ferguson last night. His club was facing the end of its role as kings of England and facing the end as kings of Manchester, too.
Ferguson sprang a few surprises when he named his team. He left out Danny Welbeck, Rafael and Antonio Valencia. He went with the old guard, Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes, the last of the Mohicans, at the core of his side.
His selection seemed to err on the side of caution, a reflection perhaps of knowing that a point would be enough.
Ferguson railed against that idea, though. “We are going out to win it,” he said before the game. “I have never played for a draw in my life.”
And United began more brightly, clipping the ball around with a confidence borne of greater experience in crunch situations like this.
But Gareth Barry and Yaya Toure, who was magnificent, soon started to control midfield and City pressed United back into their own half. United kept their shape.
They stayed tight and disciplined, content to try to soak up City’s pressure and hit them on the counter. All that changed on the stroke of half-time when Vincent Kompany, the City skipper, rose above Chris Smalling to meet a David Silva corner and thudded a towering header past David de Gea.
And even though United threatened occasionally in the second half, they could not force an equaliser.
The question now is can Ferguson do it again? Can he rise to this challenge, the biggest he has ever faced against the new might of the Premier League’s richest club?
It is a risky business writing his epitaph but it will take an effort to dwarf everything he has done before to quell City now.