Thanking City For Saving Carling Cup...
It's remarkable what £200m of spending and 34 years without a trophy can do to boost the importance of English football's ginger stepchild of a trophy.
Over 36,000 fans watched Manchester City's demolition of Scunthorpe on Tuesday night - just two years ago a third-round clash in the same competition against a bigger club attracted barely more than 20,000 hardy souls.
Manchester City's ascension to the elite club at the top of the Premier League is the shot in the arm that the Carling Cup desperately needed. It has become a priority not only for a club who need to deliver some silverare - any silverware - after a remarkable spending splurge, but for other clubs aware that their odds of winning sexier trophies are lengthened by City's ominous presence.
Hence we arrive at a situation where six of the Premier League's top seven sides (plus Blackburn and Portsmouth) are in the last eight of the Carling Cup - a situation unthinkable even three years ago when only half of the quarter-finalists were 'big clubs' and people spoke about easing the load of the clubs in Europe by granting them exemption from the competition.
Perhaps some clubs would have taken that option before City's spending - and to a lesser extent the splashing of the cash in one area of north London at least - made trophies harder to win and thus more precious. Despite the obvious gap in status between Arsenal and Tottenham for example, Spurs fans can still point to their League Cup victory of 2008 as more recent success. And they do. And it hurts. If Arsenal win the Carling Cup this season, you can bet the celebrations will match those usually reserved for league titles. That's what five years without a trophy can do for fans.
Those five years could easily become six, seven or eight years, until Arsenal match Aston Villa's barren spell of 14 years. City's emergence from the darkness seems likely to relegate Villa into a battle for sixth, and fans will struggle to get excited about basically standing still in the Premier League. The way to keep them excited is to at least challenge for a trophy, so a first-choice Villa side beat Sunderland on Tuesday just a year after the likes of Isaiah Osbourne and Marlon Harewood succumbed to QPR.
Those of us blessed with the status of Premier League neutrals can applaud City's arrival at the top table for revitalising English football's finest trophy (when was the last time a fifth side boasted odds of 12/1 to win the title?) but equally, they can be thanked for helping to save a much-maligned competition which has given us midweek football more exciting than many Champions League weeks.
The mancityfans.net football forum
The BEST FORUM in all the land and all the world
[/center]
[/center]
