The goal that decided the game arrived on the half hour when Ledley burst forward from midfield and fed the overlapping Capaldi, the full back then came as close to scoring as he did all season when his shot was beaten out by Larrieu but the keeper was unlucky in that the ball dropped straight to the oncoming Ledley who had an easy tap in. Plymouth came very close to equalising two minutes later when Norris' shot took a deflection that left Schmeichel stranded, but the ball came back off the upright and, truth be told, that was as close as they came to scoring. Although City didn't threaten too much after that, sub Steve MacLean marked his last appearance at Ninian Park by missing a couple of great chances and, although Plymouth's impressive army of travelling support no doubt felt otherwise, City probably just about deserved the points.
The Plymouth match was Kasper Schemichel's last for the club as he returned to Man City to fight for the first team place he had held at the start of the campaign. I don't anyone can doubt that Schemichel was a good signing for City. Of his fourteen matches played , six had been won and only three lost and with only fourteen goals conceded, he had played a full part in shoring up a defence that had been far too leaky before he arrived - in fact, it's true to say that Scheichel had relatively little to do in his last few matches for us because we were defending so well.
It was after the Plymouth win that I first allowed myself to think in terms of City making into the Play Offs - in taking sixteen points from their last seven games, they had, as far as I was concerned anyway, banished any more thoughts of being dragged back into the relegation struggle. The league table now supported such optimistic thinking with City standing nine points clear off the bottom three and just three below the top six - the team were now genuine contenders in what was to remain a very congested race for the Play Off places right up until the end of the season.
January 1 also marked the reopening of the transfer window and with money coming in from the Gunter deal, there was a hope that City would be able to do more than just replace the departing Kasper Schmeichel - for the second successive year there was a great opportunity for the City board to grasp the nettle and go for the Premiership, but for the second successive year, it didn't happen.
City now entered the competition that was to define their season when they travelled to face non league side Chasetown in the Third Round of the FA Cup. Chasetown (which is a village in Staffordshire) were in the British Gas League Midlands Division and were described as the lowest ranked side ever to reach this stage of the competition - at the time the game was played they were 6 leagues and 135 places below City in the English football pyramid! However, when the draw had paired us with "Chasetown or Port Vale", I definitely wanted the latter because Port Vale were adrift at the bottom of League One whereas Chasetown were a buoyant side having what was, at that time, probably the best season in their history.
By firstly drawing 1-1 at Vale Park and then winning the replay 1-0, Chasetown had earned themselves a lot of headlines and, I thought at the time, a decent chance of progressing further. As City's performances and results started to pick up through December so my doubts tended to disappear, but City, with Aaron Ramsey in for his first starting appearance instead of the suspended Steve McPhail, Michael Oakes in for the departed Kasper Schemichel and Steve MacLean in for the rested Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, soon made sure that their game, which kicked off at lunchtime, became the national sporting media's main focus for a while when they presented Chasetown with the lead after seventeen minutes! The goal was even more embarrassing as it came when McNaughton, with the aid of a push from home striker Perry, turned the ball past Oakes and as City struggled to come to terms with their surroundings and the muddy pitch, it has to be said that, for some time after that, there was little sign of them equalising.
The game had gone into added time at the end of the first half before City finally showed evidence of the yawning gap in terms of status between the teams as Ramsey, who was doing well in central midfield, came short to receive a free kick from Johnson then ran at the defence before threading a clever pass to MacLean who held the ball up before finding Whittingham who scored from the edge of the box with a lovely sidefooted shot.
After that it was more or less one way traffic as the home side ran out of steam in the second half - the impressive Ramsey, who was nominated as man of the match by many of the national hacks at the game hoping to witness a giantkilling, headed his team in front from close range after an hour when Paul Parry won a ball on the far post and thirteen minutes later Parry capitalised on a clever through pass by Ledley to seal a 3-1 win. In the end, it was an efficient performance by City who left with the compliments of all from Chasetown ringing in their ears for the part they had played in the greatest day in their team's history, but City found themselves again cast in the role of giants to be killed when the draw gave them an awkward looking away game at Tranmere or, eventual winners of the tie, Hereford.
The fall out from the decision not to retain Neil Alexander continued as City went in search of yet another keeper this time to replace Schmeichel and this time they found a 30 year old Finnish International with Premiership experience who was to stay for the rest of the season. On the face of it, that sounds quite an impressive CV, but, if you dug a little deeper, then the doubts started to emerge. Peter Enckelman was Blackburn's third choice keeper who will always be remembered for his howler in a Birmingham v Aston Villa. Completely predictably, this was the subject of the first question Enckelman was asked when he was introduced to the local press after signing for City and he dealt with it well - more of a concern for me and a few others was the fact that he had played no first team football anywhere since the 2004/05 campaign, in these days where goalkeepers are loaned out so often, that seemed very odd.
Quite often Premiership clubs only allow players out on loan with the proviso that they play first team football for the period they are with a lower division club, but this didn't seem to apply to Enckelman as he sat on the bench for the home match with struggling Sheffield Wednesday as Michael Oakes kept his place in the starting line up.
I am not sure what odds you would have got on a team winning four out of a sequence of six home matches by 1-0 with the goal being scored around the half hour mark, but that's exactly what happened as City followed the script of Ipswich, Sheffield United and Plymouth wins almost to the letter! This time, the goal was a little late in coming - Hasselbaink's lobbed finish from a Rae pass arriving on 36 minutes, but this was more comfortable than the other three victories as City played with the confidence of a team that had only lost twice in twelve matches.
The first half in particular saw the team dominate and if Johnson's header which hit the crossbar had been a couple of inches lower and Ledley had not made a mess of a simple right footed chance, then City would have the sort of a lead that their domination merited. The second half started in much the same way when Glenn Loovens headed against the upright, but the game became more equal after that and, whilst they weren't exactly hanging on by the end, it would be true to say City were grateful to Michael Oakes for a couple of smart saves as he kept his only clean sheets in the fifteen appearances he was to make for the club.
There was more transfer movement during the following week - if the departure of Chris Gunter for an "undisclosed fee" had been expected, then that of Steve MacLean to Plymouth Argyle most certainly was not. This time though, City were nowhere near as reticent about the size of the fee as they wasted no time in saying that it was £500,000! To be honest, you couldn't blame the club for trumpeting this figure because half a million pound for a player we had signed for nothing represented excellent business, but Plymouth were in the process of rebuilding their squad as many regular first teamers had made it clear that they would not be renewing their contracts when they ran out in the summer and so manager Paul Sturrock was prepared to pay a club record fee for a player who had done well for him at Sheffield Wednesday.
The good thing for City was that it could definitely be argued that Maclean would not really be missed. Whenever I watched him play, I couldn't help thinking there was a good player in there somewhere and that we would see the best of him when he had a sustained run of games in the side - the truth was though that he never played consistently enough to get that sequence of four or five starts and, with just three goals to show from his seventeen appearances at Plymouth, he has hardly been a success at his new club either.
With squad members like Jason Byrne also leaving the club at this time, many supporters clung to the hope that the club would be able to bring in some new faces in the fortnight that remained of the January transfer window, but it was a forlorn one. Now, I am sure that Peter Ridsdale could come up with all sorts of reasons for the club's failure to sign any outfield players from August onwards and he would make them all sound very convincing. However, I think that's scant consolation to supporters who had watched us be transformed from relegation candidates into one of the form teams in the division (I would say only Stoke were in a better form at the time) - with the Championship once again turning out to be a very competitive league with so many teams of a similar standard, I would say that, even more than in 2006/07, City fans had cause to look at the table at the end of the season and say "if only".
Whether you belonged in the camp that thought the new regime were doing a great job under very trying circumstances or the one that thought they were a bunch of egg chasers only interested in the retail development at Leckwith, what could not be denied was that City were back in the all too familiar position of not having a big enough squad. If we did ever have the "best squad ever", then the selling and release of so many outfield players without replacing them meant that Dave Jones was again left with a squad that, as had been proved over the previous two seasons, lacked the depth to maintain a genuine promotion challenge. However, at least this time the cloud did have a silver lining to it in that our manager would be forced, not before time in the eyes of many, to make use of the very talented Aaron Ramsey who had only turned 17 on Boxing Day.
For the second time in less than a month City faced an away match at the side topping the table and it is a sign of the progress that they had made that, just as at Watford, they came away disappointed with only a draw as they were foiled by a late equaliser in their game at the Hawthorns against West Brom. Just as in the League Cup match in September on the same ground, City got off to a fast start as they scored in thirty seconds when Paul Parry finished off a slick passing movement with a long range showed which beat Kiely with the aid of a slight defelction.
City had scored in the same net four times in the first half an hour in the League Cup match and, although there was never much chance of them running away with this match in similar fashion, they enjoyed a pretty comfortable opening thirty minutes as a West Brom side that were comfortably the leading scorers in the Championship, were reduced to shooting from distance. City were forced into a change on 32 minutes when Darcy Blake got his first taste of league action for nearly five months when he came on for the injured Kevin McNaughton - Blake slotted in at right back and his first contribution was to begin the move that ended with Parry breaking into the box to score with an angled drive from about eight yards to double the lead.
Unfortunately, having taken what should have been a stranglehold on the game, City allowed West Brom back into it almost immediately when Bednar headed in from a free kick and, although I would have thought that all connected with City would have happily setteled for a 2-1 lead at half time, you couldn't help thinking that things may well get tougher after the break.
The early minutes of the second period saw City put under predictable pressure, but when another goal arrived on 52 minutes, it was them who scored it as Ledley broke quickly from a corner, saw his pass bounce back to him off a defender and then rolled a left shot from about fifteen yards into the corner of the net to make it seven City goals scored at the Hawthorns in just over two hours of football!
This was the signal for Albion to intensify their pressure and it was pretty much one way traffic towards the City goal after that. If City could have held on to their two goal lead for another five minutes or so, perhaps, West Brom's spirit might have been broken, but they pulled a goal back at just about the right time when Albrechtsen beat Oakes with another header. There were now eighteen minutes left for City to hold on and their previous record of holding on to leads made you doubt whether they could - to be fair to City, they were up against a quality side this time and they almost managed it, but with two minutes of a normal time left, a freakish bounce off Roger Johnson looped up over Oakes and dropped slowly into the net.
Under the circumstances, City were just glad to cling on their point after that as Albion sensed a late winner, but they had played their full part in an enthralling match. It became a bit of a cliché throughout the season for pundits to say, in spite of the closeness of the Championship, that West Brom were the best team in it and it was generally accepted that they were the best footballing team in the division. However, it interesting to note that, whereas all three City goals came from open play, two of West Brom's came from dead ball situations and the other was an own goal. Some media men also noted that West Brom only got on top when they, very unusually, resorted to knocking high balls into the box. City had been edging the game while it had been a football match and West Brom had to abandon their principles to get back into it - if it was generally accepted that West Brom played the best football in the league, then, as the season wore on, there was a growing body of body of opinion that thought that, on their day, City played the next best.
TBC