The last game of the season often throws up interesting games, especially when they’re the most meaningless. Defences can’t be bothered, but strikers will always love to score goals.
For Manchester City in 2007/08, a fabulous start to the season saw Sven-Goran Eriksson lead a new-look side to seven wins in his first ten Premier League games. But after Christmas, form tailed-off dramatically, and an unlikely push for the Champions League turned into a ninth place finish. Five defeats in their final seven games saw Eriksson’s fate sealed.
The Swede was sacked after leading the team on a post-season tour to Thailand, as per owner Thaksin Shinawatra’s wishes. It may have been galling trip to make, knowing that he was heading for the sack but still being asked to take charge of a meaningless tour of the Far East, but Sven handled it expertly: on a Thai beach one day, he approached Dietmar Hamann at 10am with a bottle of Champagne in one hand and two glasses in the other. When Hamann asked what they were celebrating, Eriksson replied in a way that only he could have: “Life, Kaiser,” he told the German, “we are celebrating life”.
It wasn’t his libertinage nor his bon vivant approach to life that sealed his sacking, though. By all accounts, it was a terrible second half of the season, sealed by the final game. Away to Middlesbrough, City slumped to an 8-1 defeat devoid of pride, fight, and even dignity: the kind of defeat that tells a board everything they need to know.
And as City play Middlesbrough this weekend in an FA Cup quarter-final, it’s a good time to look back at some of the characters in that particular Mancunian tragedy.
Since that day, a lot has happened in the stories of both clubs. That game just happened to be City’s final Premier League match of the pre-Abu Dhabi era, and that very summer, Mark Hughes was appointed as manager and essentially presented with Robinho as a deadline day gift: just as a Sheik may give his wife a diamond bracelet just as a surprise, Hughes was given a silky Brazilian diva. The rest, though, is history.
Middlesbrough, however, would be relegated at the end of the next season, returning to the Premier League for only this season. Life has thrown a lot at both clubs, but clearly their trajectories have been far from similar.
At the Riverside that day, though, Middlesbrough were the clear winners. After Richard Dunne’s red card in the first half, City crumbled, and Eriksson’s lament in his post-match comments to the BBC are telling. “We were in it until it was 3-0,” he claimed. Could a manager ever utter a sadder sentence after an 8-1 thrashing that cost him his job?
Middlesbrough had a hat-trick hero that day, of course. One of the most famous of Premier League flops, Brazilian striker Afonso Alves came to England on the back of 45 goals in 39 Eredivisie games for Heerenveen. The phrase ‘banging in the goals’ doesn’t really do it justice, but those goals certainly dried up when he came to England. Three of his ten Premier League strikes for Middlesbrough came that day.
After Boro’s relegation – a season in which he managed only four goals in 31 league games – Alves spent a few seasons pottering around the Middle East before retiring in 2015. Since then, though, it seems that Sven Goran Eriksson isn’t the only man celebrating life:
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Another player amongst the scorers that day was Fabio Rochemback. And as was mostly the way with Middlesbrough players of the late 00s, he is another player who Boro will feel like they never got the most from. Signed from Barcelona after a reasonably successful loan period in Portugal with Sporting, Rochemback holds a rare distinction of being a losing finalist in two successive UEFA Cup campaigns with two different teams: with Sporting in 2005, and Boro in 2006.
In the City game in 2008, Rochemback scored a fantastic free kick, netting his side’s sixth of the afternoon after 80 minutes. It was his final goal in north Yorkshire, as that summer he moved back to Portugal to play one more season with Sporting before effectively ending his professional career in China and moving back to Brazil.
From a Manchester City perspective, though, things have also changed hugely.
On the pitch that day were the likes of Andreas Isaksson, who has been playing in Holland and Turkey since leaving City. Now back in his native Sweden, he only retired from international football after Euro 2016 having earned 133 caps, the third most in his country’s history.
Their solitary scorer that day, probably the biggest cult hero of the mid to late 00s period in City’s history, was Elano Blumer. After leaving City, Elano went to Turkey, turning out for Galatasaray for a few seasons and making the 2010 Brazil World Cup squad, scoring two goals in the group stages. He then moved back to Santos in Brazil, with a few spells in the Indian Super League thrown in for good measure before retiring in December.
Recently it has been reported that Elano is expected to become the assistant coach at Santos, and also that there also may be a friendly match played between City and the Brazilian club in his honour.
On Saturday afternoon, City will travel to the Riverside once again, but this time you get the feeling that if there is to be an 8-1 thrashing, it’ll be a reversal rather than a repeat. Both teams are unrecognisable from that game nine long years ago, but it was a game which probably sparked the differing paths of both clubs. For Boro, it was the last hurrah for quite some time. For City, the darkest moment before the dawn.
Maybe it should have been City, and not Sven, celebrating life on that beach in Thailand the guts of a decade ago.
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