This will get you in the mood...

[bluemoon]

Brilliant article by Martin Samuel, you have to say everything is in place for what could be the most exciting many blues under the age of 30 have seen. Over to you Hughes, Given, Richards, Zabaletta, Onouha, Toure, Barry, Ireland, Kompany, De Jong, Robinho, Adebayor, Tevez, Santa Cruz and co.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-1206657/Inside-Manchester-City-The-desire-changed-club--got-Champions-League-us.html

[gillie]

Cant click on the link?.

[bluemoon]

Had to change the colour of the text, because the hyperlink colour blends into the background and you can barely see it. Think Dan will need to change the hyperlink colour to white.

[BlueMoonAwoken]

I love these quotes from robinho.


‘In the end, the ball is round. It is round in Sao Paulo, where I come from, it is round in Manchester; wherever you go it is the same shape. My club was Santos, so people always ask me about Pele, because that was his club, too, and I am flattered; but my real inspiration is the ball, not any player.

‘What never alters is that if you are Brazilian, you want to play. I play in the street when I go back to Brazil on holiday. That is where I grew up, not on the beach. We played a fast game, like England, and tough, too — you got kicked a lot. That is what it is like in Brazil.

‘The forwards through to the midfield play the beautiful game, the midfield through to the back, they kick. If you watch a Brazilian team train it is very funny because we are
attacking them and making fun, and they want to kick us but they know they can’t because we have to be one team the next day. So the defenders get very frustrated.

‘I played with my father, Gilvan, too. He was not a footballer, he used to work for the water company. I would run rings around him, he was a bad player. He used to end up kicking me as well, but it was all good preparation. Whenever you play as a forward you have to be ready for that.

‘The day I do not finish with bruises on my legs it will be time to finish because only poor players are not worth kicking.

‘In England, they either kick you, or mark you very tight. English defenders have good positional sense; they know how to get into you. So I think what I am going to do before the ball arrives. If I am already thinking one move on, I can avoid it.’

[john68]

And after tomoorow's game, he will be able to add..."I play in Blackburn and they kick you too".
The only similarity he will ever see between the "Dingles" and Brazil.

[City1970]

Great article, and ir shows how far we have come, and proffesional we now are.

But why do they have to drag that bull about Frank wanting to incorporate the elephant in the badge. Oh dear.

[irblinx]

It's good to finally be getting some info on all the "behind the scenes changes" that they were banging on about last season. No HR department? We really were being run with a small time attitude before, I don't quite understand how the likes of Bernstein and Wardle let that carry on to be honest

[Crossie]

Our very own Cant*na

[dazlebluefrog]

help is needed here carn't link it iether, can someone maybe copy it so i can see it please ,cheers

[Niall Quinns Discopants]

Link fixed.

You can do links in colours by putting the link inside URL's and then putting the colour over all of it.

[Crossie]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/footba ... ue-us.html

cut and paste it into your browser if all else fails

[baldyblue]

‘The day I do not finish with bruises on my legs it will be time to finish because only poor players are not worth kicking.

great quote

[One cap Whitey]

Great article from our new friend Martin Samuel. The facilities at Carrington sound great these days I'd love to have a nosey round there.

[craigmcfc]

What a really good article that is, good on the club for letting him in behind the scenes and therefore able to give a true reflection on where the club currently is. Nice one

[john@staustell]

Even Jim White's pulling for us in the Tele. Well, nearly.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/leagues/premierleague/mancity/6029021/Manchester-City-can-shake-up-predictable-Premier-League.html

A whole rash of articles this week on how great it would be to break the SKY 4 monopoly.

Bring it on!

[john@staustell]

Even Jim White's pulling for us in the Tele. Well, nearly.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/leagues/premierleague/mancity/6029021/Manchester-City-can-shake-up-predictable-Premier-League.html

A whole rash of articles this week on how great it would be to break the SKY 4 monopoly.

Bring it on!

I think this link colour thing and URL auto-link thingy is Dan's first job when getting out of bed!!:

Manchester City can shake up predictable Premier League
Here is a game you might try out with any of your football-fancying friends. Ask them to write down the order they think the Premier League clubs will finish at the end of this season. Then, without looking at their predictions, impress them by telling them exactly what they have written down.

By Jim White
Published: 5:30PM BST 14 Aug 2009


You can guarantee that they will have placed Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester City in their top five, Aston Villa, Everton, Tottenham, West Ham and Fulham in the next five, and the rest in their bottom 10. A bit like those mathematical puzzles which ask you to take away the number you first thought of, as a trick it always works.

Sure, the order within those groupings might vary. Some will have Liverpool as champions, others United, those blinded by the flash of cash might even tip City. At the bottom, any three of the 10 will be identified as relegation candidates.

City to make final Lescott offer Some will believe Wigan will go down now they have lost Steve Bruce as manager, others will identify Sunderland as certain for the drop now that they have appointed Steve Bruce as manager. Some will reckon that Hull's time has surely come, others will point out that, as was the case last season, there might well prove to be three even more chronically incompetent teams in the league. Most will believe Portsmouth's precarious ownership has them doomed.

But wherever you do the trick, whoever you do it with, the components within those three groupings will be the same. Compared to the Championship, in which only Mystic Meg could engage in a convincing act of clairvoyance given that any one of 18 clubs could win the thing, the Premier League is no longer a single entity.

It has become a competition within a competition within a competition, with three separate leagues running concurrently: the race for the title, the race for Europe and the race for survival.

"There are 16 clubs, maybe 15 now, who know before a ball is kicked they have absolutely no chance of winning the league," says Dave Whelan, the chairman of Wigan Athletic.

"We're competing for different things. For Man United it is all about challenging for the title. For us it is all about hanging on in there. We know we can't win it, but we believe we can survive. And that's the same for the majority of the clubs. They're not in it to win it, they're in it still to be in it next year."

The reality of the Premier League's diminishing democratic spread is evident in the statistics of success. Over the past 15 seasons, three clubs (Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal) have won the title.

In the previous 15 years, eight (Blackburn, Manchester United, Leeds, Arsenal, Liverpool, Everton, Aston Villa and Nottingham Forest) won it. More tellingly, two of those champion outfits – Forest and Leeds – clinched the championship within two years of gaining promotion.

That kind of upward mobility simply could not happen now. Not even Alastair Campbell could spin the idea that Burnley will be topping the Premier League next May. Indeed, it is pretty fruitless trying to argue the case that they will finish above the halfway line. The Turf Moor club's best hope is to be more successful than three other members of the stragglers group, their role defined by entirely by economics.

Richard Scudamore, the Premier League chief executive, insists that the division of his competition into such clear cartels does not diminish its competitive interest.

"Any week, any team can beat any other, that's the joy of it," he says. "Top can lose to bottom and does. Remember, Liverpool lost to Middlesbrough last season. As long as that possibility exists then you simply cannot say the league has lost its purpose."

Yet the facts increasingly conspire against such analysis. The principal lesson Rafael Benitez must have learned from last season is this: you do not triumph in the Premier League by losing at Middlesbrough.

Manchester United did not become champions last term by demonstrating superiority over their fellow members of the top four. With home and away defeats to Liverpool and just a point gained from Arsenal, their return against the elite was more relegation than table-topping form.

Rather, they became champions because their performance against the teams from below the division's halfway line was almost flawless. Barring a home draw with Newcastle on the opening game of the season, United won every game against the bottom 10 clubs. From an available 60 points, they banked 58.

Liverpool, by contrast, secured 49. Benitez's mistake was, in fixtures against such teams, resting his match-winning players.

But the simple mathematics of the Premier League insist that you gain the same number of points from a win achieved through a dodgy last-minute penalty at home to Sunderland as you do from a 4-1 evisceration of United at Old Trafford. And Sir Alex Ferguson has long recognised that.

His major disappointment in losing Cristiano Ronaldo is not that he will miss his pastel-shaded shorts. No, it is that he can no longer call on the services of the league's most effective flat track bully. Last season, no fewer than 17 of the Portuguese winker's 18 league goals came against clubs outside the top four.

Jose Mourinho, too, was a sturdy advocate of the Ferguson approach. His Chelsea twice won the league by overpowering the minnows, ensuring fixtures against the less financially well-endowed yielded maximum return.

The philosophy remains ingrained in the fabric of the club: despite last season's managerial roundabout, Chelsea only dropped two points against the trailing 10.

Which is the main reason they finished ahead of Arsenal, a club which, with its manager's newly discovered fondness for ball-playing midgets over strapping athletes, seems temporarily to have mislaid the aura that once made the team invincible; they picked up 12 points fewer than Chelsea against the bottom half.

And this is how the league will be won again this season: by not forgetting to win at Wigan. Thus making the claim of bottom being able to beat top look ever more obsolete. Still it would be wrong to suggest Scudamore is not doing all he can to smooth out the economic disparity at the heart of this divide.

Financially, he presides over the most egalitarian operation in Europe. This season, the champion club is guaranteed to receive £50 million of the new centrally negotiated broadcast income, while the bottom side will get £40 million.

In Spain, where the clubs do their own thing, Real Madrid will accrue from the box 15 times as much as less broadcast-friendly rivals. But even as Scudamore does his best to create competition through redistribution, the economic split continues to grow. And it is beyond his control.

The reason the top group has removed itself from the rest is by dint of access to Champions League funds: the income of a run in Europe can easily double what they accrue from the Premier League. It has become a self-perpetuating dynamic: they grow ever richer because they have access to more money.

It could be argued that other sports have their hegemonies. In reality, only four male tennis players have a real chance of winning the US Open. Few could see beyond half a dozen golfers picking up the USPGA. Durham are far more likely to land the county championship than Worcestershire.

But in each case, a position of dominance has been achieved through the application of skill. In the Premier League, it is increasingly about the institutionalised application of cash. The divide between the league's inner divisions has grown exponentially every season until it is now the widest breach in sport.

We have yet to see whether Manchester City can ford the gap after spending more than the annual budget of a small government department.

But many outside east Manchester will be hoping this injection of cash from elsewhere will succeed. If nothing else in order prevent this becoming a competition whose outcome is about as hard to predict as the result of a by-election in downtown Pyongyang.

[dazby]

A first walk down memory lane for the weekend.

[Slim]

I fucking hated that story, made us look like a real Mickey Mouse outfit.

[kinsey]

I fucking hated that story, made us look like a real Mickey Mouse outfit.

We were!