A Warning. To: Man City. From: History

Pretty dull stuff last night, but job done and nice to get a look at some of the young prospects. Impressed with Kane’s general awareness, and Carroll’s speed of thought and feet. No criticism for any of the rest, even if they didn’t dazzle, so let’s wait until they give interviews saying they should be starting every week before we get on their backs. To mirror the general mood around the Lane last night, this blogs attention now turns to Sunday and the visit of Manchester City.

Despite our little flurry of transfer activity, including the capture of central midfielder Iago Falque Silva on loan from Juve, and the signing of Adebayor, and EVEN IF we were to get Diarra, we still wouldn’t come close to this lot. You may have heard they’ve got a bit of lolly and aren’t afraid to spend it

Uwe Rosler and Shaun ‘The Goat’ Goater have been replaced with a couple of lads from Argentina, and for Georgi Kinkladze and Nicky Summerbee, read David Silva and Samir Nasri, their slightly upgraded modern day equivalents. For every other area of the pitch, a sea of numbers to shock a shekel splashing soccer sheikh. Except that it doesn’t; it just goes on and on, and you can’t help but wonder how much more of the planets footballing talent might have been hoovered up if they were allowed to name more than 25 men in their squad. But we’re not playing a team of numbers, we’re playing a, albeit expensively assembled, group of 11 footballers who are fallible to the pressures of price tags and expectations. And I think we’ll beat them.

Despite a promising start, and without doubting the quality of the individuals in their squad, I still don’t ‘buy’ Manchester City. They remind me of a horse racing game I used to play on Facebook, where you’d start off with a horse, train it up, enter it in races, get prize money, buy more horses, and, if you were patient enough, eventually have a stable full of thoroughbreds, and all the riches you could virtually wish for. However, with the money came expensive temptations, and for a bit of your prize pot, you could buy steroids to artificially enhance the development of your horse. Being a very ethical game player, I was never tempted by such things, but then one day, having achieved relative game success, I thought I’d give the ‘roids a go to see what happened.

It all started out brilliantly. Les Ferdinand was storming all of the races he was entering, and winning me loads of cyber dosh in the process. I was beginning to question my whole approach to this horse racing business, and wondered why I wasted all that time developing and nurturing all those other nags, when I could have just goosed them all up from the start. What kind of a trainer was I, that I was so rigid in my approach, I’d blinded myself to such a lucrative and success-strewn path? I was the Arsene Wenger of the Facebook horse-racing game world! But then, something terrible happened. ‘Les Ferdinand has suffered ‘Roid Rage’ and had to be destroyed’. Oh dear.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere. One minute you’re a thoroughbred champion trotter with all the riches in the world, and the next, you’re doing guest appearances at junior school fetes; turning too off your mash to know where you are. Then, you suddenly you flip out, brain a small child, and you’ve got a tranq pellet in your backside while you foam at the mouth and yearn for the life you once had. I’m not saying this will DEFINITELY happen to Man City, but if this game taught me nothing else, it’s that it probably will.