To set things in context, I originally posted the story of my first City game on a message board in early 2004, a day or two after we’d been dumped out of the cup by the dark side, and a few short weeks before we subjected them to that 4-1 pounding!

The first match I ever went to was City v Southampton, 17 December, 1966. A nice symmetry – my first and last games at Maine Road against Southampton. My widowed mother had an admirer who clearly thought that one way to her heart was through her 9-year old son. Reasoning thus, and blithely disregarding the fact that my mother is a red, he turned up at our house in his Ford Anglia 1200 Super, a sky blue one with a white flash, and presented me with a City scarf – one of those knitted ones that are just sky blue and white stripes (and which was stolen from me some 5 or 6 years later in Victoria bus station by a red twice my size after a derby) and a huge sky blue wooden rattle, which I never took to a match. If I had any idea what had happened to it, it would doubtless be classed as an offensive weapon purely on the grounds of the noise it made, leaving aside the fact it weighed about the same as a house brick.

Little did I know what a defining moment that was to be. I had some passing interest in football, largely on the grounds that my schoolmates did. Born in Chingford (oh, the shame – Chingford, famous for Norman Tebbit, Ian Duncan Smith – and David Beckham) I found myself living in Crumpsall from the age of four. I had thought things through logically, consulted a road map, and calculated that the nearest team (that I had heard of) to Chingford was Spurs. Coolly, therefore, I had elected to become a Spurs supporter. Jimmy Greaves was my hero (not a bad choice at the time, he was a wonderful footballer). So, as I set off that day with Uncle Henry, I was not really that impressed with the prospect of watching Manchester City.

Uncle Henry had a seat in the Main Stand – I don’t know what block, but somewhere between the penalty box and the half-way line towards the Platt Lane, about half way back. Good seats. The anticipation before the match was spine tingling. I didn’t really have any clear idea what it was I was supposed to be anticipating, but people around me obviously did, and it was infectious.

Once the match started I couldn’t follow it – every time the ball went near the goal everybody stood up and I couldn’t see. I didn’t know who the players were (although I soon learnt). But I remember the noise – I’d never heard grown men chanting and shouting like that before. And the air of excitement every time we mounted an attack – all those grown men as caught up in the action as I would have been in a child’s game – I’d never seen adults act like that. I’d never experienced that emotion, that passion, that fervour, that desperate desire for City to excite, to score, to win, and to win well that would shortly become such a big part of my life.

For the record, we drew 1-1, but I remember nothing of the actual game, just those men in sky blue shirts on an impossibly green field – men who were nothing to me then, but who were to become heroes, 10 feet tall each one. Little did I know, little did any of us there know, that I was watching the team that was to sweep all before it over the next few years.

A couple of weeks later, I was taken with my mate Ged by his dad to Old Trafford to see United play Spurs. I had already disappointed my United supporting mother by declaring that I would be supporting Spurs in the match – as would Ged, he’d made his choice and he was blue. I suppose at that early stage it was still possible that I might have been corrupted, seduced by the dark side, but that was never to be. We stood near the half-way line, in the paddock, shouting for Spurs. It must have been a scary afternoon for Ged’s dad! It was just as noisy, I’m sure, as Maine Road had been, but somehow it was nowhere near as attractive. I wish I could explain why, but I suspect that many of you reading this will understand. United won 1-0. I was disappointed as I still had ‘feelings’ for Spurs. I wasn’t yet a fully-formed blue, perhaps, but the die had been cast and I was heading down that path.

Over the rest of that season and the next Uncle Henry took me to several more games, including an away trip to Upton Park on the train (I think that was also 1-1, but I’m not sure). I don’t really remember much about those first couple of seasons to be honest – I do know that although my all-time hero was to be (and still is) Colin Bell, my first favourite player was Alan Oakes.

I often argue to myself now that I reasoned it all out back then. I worked out that I could go to see City more often than Spurs (well, I could go to see them!). I worked out that I’d even then lived more than half my life in Manchester. I tell myself that I chose City for those reasons. But while all that is true, it isn’t really why I chose City at all. In fact, I don’t think that I did choose City – City chose me. I can work things out logically as well as the next man, but in matters of the heart – and City are a matter of the heart – then logic isn’t the tool for choosing. I think now that from the first moment I walked into Maine Road I was hooked, trapped by that unreasoning and insatiable desire that only watching City win, and win well, win with style, can truly fulfil.

That first time I went I hadn’t really known what I was letting myself in for, the second game I went to I was buzzing with anticipation, by the third I just wanted to go and watch City play at every available opportunity. And I still do.

I retained a soft spot for Spurs for many years, of which I was finally cured at Wembley on that fateful Thursday night in 1981, and although the momentous 3-4 comeback has helped to erase some of that hurt (yes, of course it still hurts) I have no sympathy now in my heart for them at all.

The rest of the story will be familiar to many – after Uncle Henry left the scene (he never stood a chance with my mother, I’ve learnt since) I sat in the Platt Lane with Ged until the North Stand was built on the old Scoreboard End terrace. We stood there for the season it was open as a terrace and then gravitated to the Kippax, where I bought my first season ticket. And it was around then that we discovered the pleasures (and dangers – this was the early 1970s) of travelling to away games. And so it goes on – and Ged and I still go to the game together.

So many memories it would be unfair to pick on some and not others – but the abiding one has to be swaying at the back of a packed Kippax, my feet barely touching the ground, all around singing at the tops of their voices, and me singing myself hoarse along with them. If you could bottle that feeling you could raise the dead.

So, 17 December, 1966 – a fateful day for this blue, a day of fragile beginnings, a day of decision. But for that day, I could have saved myself tens of thousands of pounds over the years, and oh, the heartache I could have saved myself – Wembley 1974 and 1981, the relegations, Division 2 – for sure there have been more dark times than good, and the good times are mostly long ago – City have never again approached the heights they did when I first started following them.

And yet, and yet, I watch us go 3-0 down away from home at half time in the FA Cup, on the back of an 18-game run with only one win, with our best player withdrawn through injury partway through the first half, and down to 10 men through a sending-off … and against all the odds, shockingly, impossibly, yet somehow almost predictably, we win 4-3, and I am overcome by all those emotions and passions once more – feelings that nothing else on this green earth can match. And that game sums up my relationship with City in a nutshell – that famous and oft-quoted roller coaster – from the deepest depths of despair to the ecstatic heights of rapture – over the blue moon – and all in 90 minutes. That is what I unknowingly decided to sign up for in 1966.

And now, with the memory of our last game, going down to the old enemy at Old Trafford, fresh in my mind, do I regret my decision?

Even a little?

Do I?

Do I xxxx!