I’ll never forget where I was as City won title!
THE first City game I attended was perfect.
The Blues won 5-1 with Neil Young (2) Francis Lee, Mike Doyle and Colin Bell the goalscorers.
I thought all games I went to would be like that and, for a while, they were.
It was beautiful football bursting with great, gifted, iconic players and, at that time, the unsurpassed management team of Joe Mercer and Malcolm Allison.
Pep Guardiola’s team this season has taken me to even greater heights.
West Brom’s win at Old Trafford might have been the moment City were confirmed as Champions of England, but I knew in my heart this team would lift the title when they beat United and Spurs in back-to-back Premier League games in December.
Since then, I’ve drunk in the exhilaration of watching their amazing football without that sense of jeopardy I’ve felt throughout my time watching City.
The only occasion I’ve sensed that the supporters were willing to show what I was feeling, in public, was after the 2-0 win at Stoke in March.
I remember telling my son, just before setting out for Newcastle in 2012, if we won that day then City would be crowned champions, and despite making it hard for themselves against QPR, so it proved to be.
In 2014 Chelsea’s win at Anfield felt like the turning point for City, but the triumph of 2018 will have no such defining game for me.
Key moments in history are said to be those events when you remember where you were when it happened.
I was commentating on radio for those 2012 and 2014 triumphs, so everybody knows where I was, but for this latest Premier League title I wasn’t even in the country! Neither were two of the heroes of 2018, Ilkay Gündogen and Leroy Sane, who were both attending the same game as me watching their former teams. I was walking away from a great 2-0 triumph for Schalke 04 in the derby against Borussia Dortmund, feeling elated, when I spoke to my wife on the phone and she told me the news United had lost and City were champions. It was double euphoria, but I had no-one else to immediately share it with, apart from yelling down the phone! The nearby Schalke fans probably just assumed I was still celebrating their win. I’ll never forget where I was when City won the 2018 title, I was at Schalke. It all seems strangely appropriate. That first game I attended as a boy was City v Schalke at Maine Road on April 15, 1970 - exactly 48 years to the day earlier. Ian Cheeseman