“Do you really want to see this team destroyed?” says Mike, a Manchester City fan, after the brilliance of Rayan Cherki’s touch had produced the third, killer goal at Anfield.
We are talking in the most fervently City pub Manchester has to offer. The Mary D has the badge everywhere. One wall, on the way to the gents, has a huge image of Sergio Aguero, shirt off, celebrating that goal. It serves Blue Moon lager, and, slightly off topic, there is a statue of Marilyn Monroe, her dress up replicating the scene in The Seven Year Itch.
Seven years, from 2011-2018, is the time Manchester City are accused of fraudulently exaggerating their income. Or put another way, the way Liverpool would like to put it, cheating. Over the way from the Mary D is the Etihad Stadium, the inflated £400m sponsorship deal for which is exhibit A in the case against the club.
Even before kick-off, the mood inside the Mary D is relaxed. “What did you expect? Did you think we’d be ready to smash the place up?” said Mike, who as someone who appreciates theatre – particularly the film of Richard Burton’s Hamlet – knows how drama flows. By the finish they were embracing each other, some were even chanting for Sheikh Mansour.
The Liverpool fans who gathered in the Arkles pub on Anfield Road for a pre-match pint may consider themselves the principal victims of the fraud and false accounting. The claim is that Manchester City denied them three titles.
All this is counter-factual history and counter-factual history is a dangerous thing. If you wonder what Europe would have looked like without the First World War, it does not necessarily follow that Liverpool and Manchester City would each have won the Champions League in a city called Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire.
And if Liverpool had beaten Manchester City win the Premier League in 2014, then there would have been no Jurgen Klopp, because Brendan Rodgers would have become the first man since Kenny Dalglish to steer Liverpool to the title. Liverpool were not then the kind of club that sacked its manager nine months after winning a championship. Perhaps there would have been no Champions League triumph in 2019 because Rodgers’s record in European football was always shaky.
The only question those in the Mary D had was whether, caught beneath the landslide of allegations, their players would fold. They could yet force their way out if the “irrefutable evidence” promised by beleaguered chief executive, Ferran Soriano is, er, refuted.
Some fans are wearing the green-and-black striped shirts Manchester City wore when winning promotion from the third tier of English football. They know what players do if relegation comes calling. They call their agents. After an international break that must have seemed interminable and faced by the fiercest arena they will encounter this season, their men won with panache.
In a way, those in the Mary D are as much victims of this scandal as those in the Arkles. Erling Harland and Soriano can leave. They cannot.
Their memories are about to be ripped from them. The Mary D used to be the Labour Club for the nearby Bradford Colliery which closed in 1968, which may well be recorded as the last time Manchester City were legitimate champions of England.
Dave Wallace, who edited City’s most famous fanzine, The King of the Kippax, reflected: “I am surprised by the amount of vitriol that has been thrown our way but I think the only thing to do now is take it on the chin and see what happens.
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“For [my wife] Sue and me this was going to be our last season because we’re into our eighties. We were going to give up our season tickets, but we can’t do that now. We have to stick with the club, come what may.”
For football people of my generation the phrase “Typical City” meant defeats plucked from the gaping jaws of victory singing “Are you watching Macclesfield?” as they scored five past Stoke and were still relegated to the old Third Division; of blowing the championship in 1972 after buying Rodney Marsh just to make sure of the title. Supporting a club that won the league in 1937 and was relegated a year later, while scoring more goals (80) than any other team in the First Division.
For my children’s generation “Typical City” meant a club that won everything remorselessly and with some style. Now, they could become champions of England and still find themselves in the National League, preparing to play Altrincham, Fylde and Barrow. “And that,” said Dave Wallace “would be the most ‘Typical City’ thing of all.”