Man City’s bubble of victimhood has their fans drowning in a sense of injustice. It’s time for them to stand up to their interloper owners and declare: ‘Enough’, writes IAN HERBERT

Then came the insults – wheelbarrows of them – hurled last week by Manchester City fans at those who had the temerity to challenge the idea of ​​an overwhelmingly dominant force in British football going to court to dismantle the Premier League’s rules. League and secure the right to have unlimited rights. spent.

“Another pathetic article,” declared Steve Jones, a fan who is “waiting” for my response to his criticism that Manchester City “crushed this poster.” (So ​​there you go, Steve). Dave Temerson will apparently send the boys.

There is nothing unusual. The weaponization of bigots means that almost anything rich owners say or do is defensible these days. A friend had a brick put in one of his windows after a sequence of pieces that calmly and rigorously analyzed Manchester City’s complicated relationship with financial spending rules, a few years ago.

In the real world – beyond this bubble of victimhood and ridiculous belief that four-time champions City are somehow the “small club” fighting an establishment elite stacked against them – most people with a view on the issue abhor the idea of ​​a Gulf State hiring expensive lawyers to ensure that its own companies can funnel unlimited cash to the club, through “sponsorship deals”.

So what would it take for those fans drowning in a sense of injustice to recognize the terrible look Abu Dhabi is creating for their club?

There is certainly a line that that support base does not believe should be crossed. When City’s owners aligned themselves with the short-lived European Super League a few years ago, there were protests. “Football fans, owners, in that order,” one of the banners read. “Take out the board,” another demanded.

This time football does not move to a European dimension, but success in the court case that is currently taking place amid a cloak of secrecy, in the usual Abu Dhabi style, would make the Premier League the exclusive domain of a group of states. -nation. owners, with unimaginable money to spend.

Does it really take a huge leap of imagination to see where all this is going? A future where City’s lawyers have won this court case and quickly announce a renewed sponsorship deal with Etihad Airways worth, to pick a random number, £500 million. A future in which, once all impediments to spending are removed, City assemble a regenerated European team on a standard salary of £500,000 a week.

A team so much better than any other that most clubs come to see a trip to City as unwinnable and the Etihad fixtures come down to an even more foregone conclusion. A future in which the fascination and intrigue of the game fade into a fog of dull, sky-blue hegemony, with City against Newcastle and Abu Dhabi against Saudi Arabia the height of the competition. Ten successive titles and counting. How good will that kind of glory really feel?

Mid-sized clubs, as one owner told me last week, will think, “What’s the point?” to try to compete, should City win their current arbitration. He noted that the Championship would start to look like the best option for fans in that future. If the EFL marketers have their wits, a City victory in court would be an opportunity for some promotion of the second tier as the league where the “real competition” still lives and breathes.

Much of the public relations lines that City use in their legal cases leave you with your head in your hands. The club claims to have “irrefutable evidence” that 115 Premier League charges against them for breaching spending rules are false. When 35 of those accusations refer to lack of cooperation. When it proved so difficult to extract the necessary documents from City that the Premier League went to court in 2022 and began an arbitration process to obtain them.

But the details of the Associated Party Transaction case are really something else. They reveal an ownership barely capable of recognizing the competitive, soulful and proud club that Manchester City really was before the Abu Dhabis walked through the door. The current rules penalize clubs that have “low-profile sporting histories,” the 160-page legal document complains, apparently putting City, a club with such an immense past, in that number.

The city’s owners have not always projected this aggressive, objectionable, classless impression to the outside world. There was a time, in the years after they arrived in east Manchester, when they brought modernity and imagination to British football. Under executive Brian Marwood, they modernized the player acquisition model, buying players like David Silva and Yaya Touré for what, in retrospect, seems like a song. They built a training camp and academy like no other. They also rebuilt parts of the neighborhood on their land. They were loved.

But at some point in the subsequent campaign for world domination – driven by a charmless CEO, Ferran Soriano – it was decided that success would mean an open declaration of war on the competition in which they are privileged to participate.

Little seems able to stand in the way of City or their lawyers now, although it would be a statement if fans, knowing that the thrill of competition outweighs the temporary satisfaction of silverware, and that the game’s wider community is somewhat to appreciate above all. , could confront these intruders and declare: ‘Enough.’

Narrative of 1961 Ashes tour has contemporary echoes

For the beach this summer, or wherever you choose to be, I recommend ‘Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes’, a cover of the 1961 Ashes tour, based on the decisive fourth Test at Old Trafford. There are many contemporary echoes, among them the anguish that the sport felt at that time due to the need to score quickly to retain the public. There are also wonderful details of concerns that would fill columns like this one. Some disapproved of Ted Dexter’s tendency to chew gum at the crease.

But the series and Test are a filter through which David Kynaston and Harry Ricketts’ book (Bloomsbury £22) lays bare the elitism of English public school cricket, juxtaposing the rigid local captain Peter May with Benaud, a cricket, popular leader and sometime crime reporter. in The Sun in Sydney.

Although contemporary England would not be plagued by the indecision that May’s men suffered in Manchester that summer, we are still striving for the kind of Australian meritocracy that brought Benaud and his blue suede shoes to the fore.

The authors conclude by citing the ECB’s Independent Commission for Fairness in Cricket’s 317-page report from last year. “We were surprised by the class divide,” the report’s authors said, two days before England took to the field against Australia with nine privately trained players in their squad.

Raducanu sitting down is not an encouraging experience.

We all long for Emma Raducanu to rediscover the simple, uncomplicated game she brought to Wimbledon just three summers ago.

Sitting across from her in Nottingham on Monday and describing how tennis balls are now often too heavy was not an encouraging experience.