On the first day of the 1962-63 season, Manchester City lost 8-1 at Wolverhampton Wanderers. “Never mind,” comforted my mother, as she watched her younger son burst into tears while listening to Sports Report on a transistor radio on the beach at Newquay. “It'll never happen again for the rest of your life.” Turns out she was wrong and Philip Larkin was right.

Joe Royle, when he was the City manager, made clear his dislike of supporters like me, who suffered from what he called Cityitis. This disease, he believed, was mostly fictional. It isn't, Joe. It's made up of days like Sunday.

We didn't much care if United won the league or not. We'd beaten them twice and lost twice to Chelsea and Arsenal, so we'd certainly done our bit for the cause. A most unexpected Uefa Cup spot was on offer. All we had to do at Middlesbrough was to avoid having anyone booked or sent off. Twenty-five minutes after the referee's final whistle, they would all be on the plane to Benidorm. That worked out well, didn't it?

We had behaved ourselves under the most intense provocation at Old Trafford in February, when we had impeccably observed the minute's silence to commemorate the Munich air disaster and not offered the police or the Sky cameras the slightest excuse to cast aspersions on our sense of decorum. On the last day of the season, on Teesside, we just needed to salute our heroes as they subsided to another 1-0 away defeat and everyone would have been happy. Instead, the spineless performance on the field led to a disgraceful one off it.

City fans had been muted when faced with the prospect of Sven-Göran Eriksson as manager last summer, but, as results astonished us, we realised that many of the benefits he had brought to England, initially, had now been conferred on us. This was a sensible manager behaving rationally. Frankly, it was a pleasant surprise. The post-Christmas performances and results were poor, but the decision to sack Eriksson was a shock to all of us.

The old board wouldn't have done it, but in the Scudamore-inspired future of foreign owners and supporters who can walk down a high street in South East Asia watching a Premier League match on their mobile phones, a man who owns a football club can do whatever he wants with it.

Peter Swales was allegedly induced to relinquish the chairmanship after his 90-year-old mother had been “visited” in her old folks home in Cheshire by “concerned” fans. This tactic is unlikely to work in Bangkok, which is perhaps as well because, if Sven leaves this week, the owner's mother may be the only person who will now take the manager's job.

— Colin Shindler is the author of Manchester United Ruined My Life