Plays By Sense Of Smell said:
Add to this the crushingly urgent forces of commercial expectation to whence the soul of the club was long ago enslaved and you have a veritable crucible of tumult and unrest. As the immediate splurge is shown to have been misplaced and the 'trajectory' shows no significant signs of improvement, there will be an almighty struggle between those who want to wait and see, those who demand yet more, major change at the top, and those who think they have no option but to keep going all in at the risk of losing it all. On this last point, there are some who believe that the rags were so blinded by our emergence that they may have already made the mistakes that sealed their fate.
Very well observed post, especially the last bit.
When the takeover happened it was difficult for many in football to take it too seriously, many City fans included.
The tea-towel adorned fans outside Eastlands, that utter buffoon Sulaiman Al-Fahim, an audacious but doomed attempt to seize Berbatov from the clutches of united all pointed to a takeover that was ultimately going to fall short of its objectives. After all this was City and these people had lots of money, but that didn't guarantee success. They'd soon get bored and move on.
The next few years, if anything, merely accentuated this perception as the club went through some palpable growing pains. The Kaka fiasco, Garry Cook's numerous gaffes and a series of questionable purchases all conspired to reinforce the view that this was a club with no real vision, or to use that tiresome footballing cliche: class.
Even in the period where success was starting to flow there was still a residual sense, from those who didn't take the time to consider what was actually going on at City, that this was a project without any real substance or durability. The Tevez debacle in Munich, for example, gave succor to those who continued to harbour this wishful state of mind.
And whilst all this was going on the united bandwagon kept rolling on. A lack of investment in the playing personnel was masked by Ferguson's incredible ability, by sheer force of will, guile and naked bullying, to get much more than the sum of its parts out of his squad.
And what happened was that united stopped looking at the bigger picture. They assumed that their ever increasing sponsorship deals would ensure an enduring continuation of their hegemony. They started to believe their own publicity about the endless conveyer belt of top talent produced by their academy and they started to ignore the basic rules of squad replenishment, assuming, bloated on their own suffocating arrogance that the rules that the wider footballing world were subject to, didn't apply to them: the purchase of a Robin Van Persie was the embodiment of all this short termism that assumed they didn't need to plan for the future in any meaningful way.
Meanwhile our owners, wiser for the lessons they'd learned, slowly went about building a legacy that would, and will endure.
And, quite possibly, like the hare, snoozing under the tree, by the time they'd woken up it was too late to do anything about it.
I think it's finally starting to dawn on many reds what we've realised for some time: the future is blue and it's happened with relative ease because the club down the road thought it could never happen. They assumed if they carried doing their "thing" the rules of the footballing universe would dictate that their natural place at the top of the tree would be preserved in aspic: their right because they'd "earned it". The united way.
Does anyone think Berbatov would sign for united if that transfer was played out last summer, or next? Would City even be interested in a player of that questionable mentality and inconsistency anymore?
The footballing world has turned on its head.
Get used to it raggies. It's only just begun.
