City’s guts prove priceless
Yesterday Aguero did something more than that. With his desperate burst of inspiration at the moment of truth, Manchester City’s title was transfigured. Aguero transformed an economic inevitability into a sporting miracle.
With 90 minutes on the clock, City were already broken; doomed men shuffling towards a humiliation so absolute that it might have crushed the team’s spirit for good. Losing at home to 10-man QPR to throw the title into the hands of rivals they had beaten 6-1, such a monumental failure would have been an albatross hanging around City’s neck forever. No matter what trophies they gathered in the years to come, they could never have escaped the stench of that eternally stinking, decomposing albatross.
The City players knew it too, they knew the horror that awaited them and they knew had thrown it away. They were huddling like penguins in QPR’s penalty area, unable to reach any of the balls that came floating over, unable to find the killer touch that would beat a goalkeeper who suddenly seemed invincible; wherever they turned they couldn’t find a gap. It was over.
Manchester United had done their job, coolly professional, Ferguson striding onto the pitch to congratulate his players, knowing the 20th title was seconds away.
Opta later revealed that City had taken 42 shots in the 91 minutes preceding Edin Dzeko’s headed equaliser from David Silva’s corner. The goal had come too late to save them. And then Aguero dropped deep to take the ball in front of QPR’s midfield, played a one-two with Mario Balotelli, and, smashing the ball past Paddy Kenny at his near post, reminded us that the ultimate difference between winning and losing is not the money of the owners, but the courage, talent and inspiration of the players.
This was a moment of pure sporting drama that will live forever in the memory. People will say that Sheikh Mansour bought the title, yet in the truest sense the league belongs not to him, but to Aguero, Yaya Toure, Vincent Kompany, Carlos Tevez, Pablo Zabaleta, and all the other players who have worked so hard to make Manchester City the best team in England.
Mansour’s millions brought these players together but they were the ones who had to go out and win it. To complain that a momentous sporting achievement is devalued because those who achieved it cost so much and earn so much is peevish and boring. It is a refusal to recognise that the players have achieved something remarkable. Without their skill and determination, Mansour would have spent his money in vain.
The injury-time minutes in which City won the title would not have been played were it not for the madness of Joey Barton, who is QPR’s highest-paid player. Barton proved that paying a player a gigantic sum is no guarantee of performance.
Sheikh Mansour will presumably loom large again over the summer, as the players go on holiday and the headlines are dominated by City’s executives travelling the world, offloading their rejects and signing up new players on record deals. As they gazump rivals for the best players and drive up prices and wages for everyone else, neutrals will quickly tire of them. Nobody, probably not even most City fans, really wants English football to be dominated for years by a petrodollar dynasty from a reactionary desert kingdom. Other Premier League clubs are waiting anxiously to see whether Michel Platini’s Financial Fair Play initiative is actually going to do anything about it.
But even if the future sees City become a totalitarian force of oppression, the history they have already created will still be something to savour. They are not the best team to win the Premier League title, but they have produced more than the usual quotient of spectacular moments. The rage of Tevez. The t-shirt of Balotelli. The darting deceptions of Silva. The goals of Dzeko at Old Trafford. The flying leaps of Kompany. The emotional eruptions of Mancini. And most of all, the afternoon when it came together, when the genius of Aguero made Mansour disappear.
