Oliver Holt: Manchester City may have lost but their performance was proof that they are closing in on the champions

By David Gerges in Mirror Football Blog

Published 22:50 20/09/09

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Okay, so Manchester City didn’t quite do it.

They didn’t quite keep honours even in one of the greatest Manchester derbies of all time.

They didn’t quite stay level at 3-3 long enough for referee Martin Atkinson to check his watch and realise he should already have blown for full time.

But if ever a match was a metaphor for a changing of the guard in English football, it was this one.

If ever a performance from a losing team sounded like the rumble of a train in the distance, it was this one.

Because amid the magnificent bedlam of this classic encounter, City provided the proof that not only are they breathing down the necks of the big four but that they are bearing down on the champions themselves.

On the evidence of their performance yesterday, City’s grand project to conquer the Premier League is a lot further advanced than we thought.

The revolution isn’t just at the planning stage any more. It’s not just the stuff of fantasy and dreams.

It’s at the business end now. The revolutionaries are at the gates and scaling the fences.

And the aristocrats inside the palace are finally beginning to realise that they just might have a problem.

City have already reinvented the Manchester derby as a meaningful fixture rather than the banana skin that once merely threatened United with the occasional freak defeat.

It’s the biggest derby in the country again now, not just an unequal contest between haves and have-nots.

That’s why Sir Alex Ferguson did his best to patronise City as ’noisy neighbours’ who have hired a tinny boom-box after United’s 4-3 victory yesterday.

That’s why he said all he needed to do to make them go away was turn up the volume on his television set so he couldn’t hear them any more.

He has been trying to belittle them since he realised that under their new owners from Abu Dhabi, City are for real for the first time in the three decades he has ruled at Old Trafford.

He might say that they are ’a small club with a small mentality’ but they have never been that and now they have the money, the manager and the players to constitute a real threat to the elite.

They were without Emmanuel Adebayor, Robinho and Roque Santa Cruz yesterday, don’t forget, and they still managed to field a first class forward line of Carlos Tevez and Craig Bellamy.

Even though he was not fully fit, Tevez still reminded the United fans exactly what they were missing with a typically tenacious and determined display.

It was his perseverance that created City’s first equaliser. He chased a ball everyone else had given up as lost, forced a hesitant Ben Foster into a desperate error and laid the ball off for Gareth Barry to drive his shot over the line.

He never stopped harrying and harassing his former teammates and he should have put City ahead on the stroke of half time when he clipped a shot round Foster but saw it hit the outside of the post.

The thing is, the very presence of Tevez in sky blue was an embarrassment for United at Old Trafford yesterday.

It was a symbol of how they became a selling club over the winter, losing two of their best players to City and Real Madrid.

And it was a reminder that they have not replaced either Tevez or Cristiano Ronaldo and that they are not the same team without them.

That’s why Tevez was booed lustily every time he touched the ball and why something was thrown at him as he left the pitch at half time.

Just like Ferguson’s comments about noisy neighbours, that kind of behaviour suggests United are worried about the new enemy on their doorstep.

Because it was not just Tevez who excelled yesterday. Shay Given was magnificent in goal, Nigel De Jong and Gareth Barry were pure class at the heart of midfield, Shaun Wright-Phillips scared United with his pace and Bellamy...well, he was Tevez with knobs on.

“We will be stronger as a result of today, not weaker,” Hughes said. “We have got the means and the resources and the will to be better in the future.

“We know we can have an excellent season this year. We wanted to start quickly and start well and give ourselves an opportunity to do something special later in the season. We still believe we can do that.

"We are not going away any time soon. We are going to be around for a long time.”

Nor is Hughes afraid to aim a few barbs at United. He described Gary Neville as ’a lunatic’ for the way the United substitute celebrated Owen’s injury time winner and observed that United, generally, were ’over-excited’.

Ferguson’s right about that part. City aren’t twitching behind their net curtains any more. They are noisy neighbours.

And when the United boss gets out of his chair, turns his television off and listens to see if the party on the other side of town has come to an end, he may discover Hughes and his players have got louder than ever.

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