Imagine how much better those early takeover years would have been if Sven was the man in charge and not Hughes. Actually, scratch that for a second, imagine what we could have done before the takeover if Thaksin hadn't slowly turned against Sven from January onwards in 2008. Ol' Blue Eyes had us 4th at Christmas with half of Pearce's squad still hanging around in the dressing room. We'd have always dropped off eventually - but we were 7th the day we did the Manchester derby double at Old Trafford, and we only dropped to 9th on the final day when the secret was out about Thaksin and none of our players could make a tackle for fear of us losing out on a UEFA Cup spot.
That following season when we brought in the likes of Zabaleta, Robinho, De Jong, Kompany, et al, we'd have finished higher than 10th with such a quality squad, that's for sure. Another top 6-8 finish would have absolutely been on the cards. And then can you imagine what Sven could have achieved with Tevez, Adebayor, Barry, and Lescott? Bet he'd have even got a proper tune out of Robinho as well. We'd probably just have fallen short of a Champions League spot in 09/10 anyway, at which point Mancini would have been hired I'm sure, but we had a good run at the League Cup that year and who knows what could have happened in Europe with a proper manager like Sven in charge.
I guess we'll never know. But what I'm trying to say is that Sven deserved better treatment from City and he'd have worked well with more backing from the board. That man came into a club that was on its knees and arse simultaneously, a bored fanbase falling out of love with coming to the stadium, and a team full of pensioners and young players with almost no in between - except for the Tuscan Wonder and Fenugreek up front. He flooded the team with new blood in a fortnight and got us playing to a proper tune for the first time in years. The most exciting time to be a Blue since Keegan's promotion season almost a decade beforehand.
On that opening day against West Ham, I was on a beach in Wales. We had the game on 5Live and the signal was a bit dodgy. The commentator was talking about all this "free-flowing football" he was seeing and we thought he was talking about the Hammers until Bianchi scored. I lived off that Elano free-kick vs Newcastle for years afterwards. And later on that season, when Ireland scored the last-minute winner against Reading, I genuinely thought we'd never lose at home again. I was only 13 and I was obviously wrong about that, but that's the kind of belief that came flooding back to City after all those years. I still remember, "City are back! City are back! Hello, hello!"
The Sheikh didn't arrive for another 12 months but Sven's season was the proper start of the fightback. 11 wins at home in the league and only four defeats. 37 points overall from games at the COMS - our best home record in the Premier League era at the time and only one point short of our home record in Pellegrini's final season. A Manchester derby double, proper exciting players we'd never heard of before like Elano and Petrov, unbeaten at home until February, competitive with the bigger boys despite having no proper striker or goalkeeper basically all season. He steadied the ship quickly and pointed it back in the right direction after years in the doldrums.
Above all though, he brought people back in droves. Some of our attendances in that last Pearce season were shocking - as low as 36,000 for some games with big sections of blue seats on show. But the majority of games under Sven were packed out at 47,000. I remember them offering those half-season cards out around Christmas because people were desperate to come and see us play every week again. I'll never forget the night we beat Bolton 4-2 and we left the ground to news that we were gonna sign Riquelme and Ludovic Giuly in January. They were never gonna come but the excitement was enough and a sign that things were finally, finally on the up again.
It's shit we'll never get to give him a proper send-off. He deserved us all clapping him and thanking him on the last day against West Ham - what team more appropriate? Gutted it didn't happen.
