Shindler in The Mail

Colin Shindler seems to be one of these City fans who always has something negative to say. We could win 5-1 and he'd moan about the goal conceded, we could sign Messi only for him to tell us we'd paid over the odds, we could win the league for him to point out that an offside effort scored in November ultimately saw us over the line. He's a man who would not only moan about a pint being half empty, but about when said pint might've cost him half a shilling. He is, quite simply, a miserable bastard.

His article in today's Daily Mail, a paper whose anti-City bias is already blatantly obvious, was the most absurd piece i've read in a while. He does have a point somewhere amongst the paragraphs and paragraphs of teary rhetoric, football fails to get any less ridiculous, but any of us can go for the cheap heartstring-tugger. We can all paint our heroes of yesteryear out to be superhuman, whiter than white, things of wonder, whilst getting on the back of the modern day game, it's too easy, especially for a man in the autumn of life who, by luck, had the good days young, and 'suffered' the club's indifferent period through middle-age.

I'm sure that most of us would ideally like to see the club owned by locals, but it's a far-fetched fantasy. Premier League football, rightly or wrongly, is sink or swim, you either keep up with the Jones's (or Roman's or Malcolm's) or you don't compete. As much as selling the club to a Thai despot, and then on to a bunch of oil-men from the Middle East might not be ideal, at least we're afloat, and not having to sell our best players, and might, just might, be able to compete. Were we to not do, you could bet your bottom dollar that Shindler would be amongst the first to moan.

The problem, for my money, is more broad. So far as Premier League football goes, the rich, meaning the top four monopoly, get richer, and everyone else treads water at best. As a club we have few options, we either struggle, just about get by and sell whatever good players we can, or we challenge, and that, as we've seen in recent seasons with few sides breaking that stranglehold, tends to take more than slowly building a side over a number of years. The people moaning about us doing nothing for years now seem to be those with their knickers in a twist about the way we're going about things. Of course spending huge amounts of money is obscene, but it's the nature of the game now, and as a fan i'd rather we were successful and hated then a pile of shit and pitied, but perhaps that's just me.