SIDELINE CUT:It is March now and they have the air and strut of champions elect and all is well for long suffering fans. But they better be careful, writes KEITH DUGGAN

IT WOULD seem the players and officials at Manchester City are actually serious about this winning the league lark. In fact, it is possible they intend going on to knock their illustrious neighbours “off their f***ing perch” and then dominating the football landscape afterwards. Someone should stop them before the club loses its way entirely.

For some of us, Manchester City will always belong to that hazy May Saturday in 1981 when they met Tottenham Hotspur in the FA Cup final. Not the replay, the scene of Ricky Villa’s fabled goal, but the often forgotten original which finished 1-1 courtesy of a goal by Tommy Hutchinson for the Blues and then another goal by the same Tommy Hutchinson for Spurs with just 11 minutes remaining.

That was the first FA Cup final we were old enough to fully understand and remember and the BBC (you could get the Beeb where we lived from the Ulster transmitters) treated the occasion with more or less the same gravity as they would a royal coronation or, say, the invasion of a small island off the tip of South America.

It was a day of pomp and circumstance and it felt more significant because here was this other Manchester team, the oppressed neighbours enjoying their day in the sun. City!

All the other English football clubs who made that claim – Birmingham or Bristol , Swansea or Lincoln: they were just pretenders. It was clear from the swagger of the fans and the suave figure of John Bond and most of all from those dashing sky blue shirts that the Mancs were the real thing. City!

They stood for whatever United did not and that was good enough.

It was a day of portentous statistics: the 100th FA Cup final and 100,000 fans packed out Wembley Stadium. In the build-up to the game, which seemed to go on for about six hours, much was made of the fact Hutchinson was the oldest player in that year’s final. He was 33: when you are nine, that seems like a cruel age to ask a man to take part in a sporting contest and we half expected to see him using a cane when the teams strolled out from the tunnel.

Instead, he delivered the game’s opening goal with an absolute bullet of a header.

The ball travelled so fast it was in the net before anyone had time to react and Hutchinson himself fell onto the ground and remained there for several seconds: we were all deeply conscious of his advanced age and were worried he had actually killed himself in his heroics.

But he was fine and like all FA Cup finals, the game fell into a kind of languor and everyone was impatient for it to be over so we could go outside and recreate it in the back garden when Hutchinson went and scored into his own goal.

Tagging it as an own goal always seemed a bit unfair: he moved to cover a Glen Hoddle free and a wickedly curled cross just deflected off his head and flew into the net with the same uncanny speed as his first effort.

He sunk forward with his hands on his knees and aged another few years before our eyes. A few older lads in the room chortled in delight at his unhappiness and at the merciless way the gods treated City but there was no reprieve.

Five days later, after an intense build-up, the replay took place on a Wednesday evening, breaking the monotony of a school week and made immortal by Ricky Villa’s goal which, in the mind’s eye, has him weaving spells through at least a dozen blue shirts before coolly scoring the winner but, through the cold light of replays, shows him as the beneficiary of truly abysmal and probably exhausted defending. No matter: Tottenham were champions and the City were the hard luck boys, gallant and eclipsed.

And for many years afterwards, that seemed to be their role in English football. They had their few shining years in the late 1960s but unlike their storied rivals at Old Trafford, City fans were raised to savour modest successes and to suffer many seasons of hardship.

If anything, they were specialists at winning the Second Division but more often than not had to content themselves with hard-scrabble days in the top-tier. But they offered football fans from Manchester an alternative to the shiny success story that United have been.

Choosing to follow City rather than United could be down to geography or family tradition but it also gave Mancunians an opportunity to opt for the underdog rather than the might of United. It is hardly an accident that many of Manchester’s music heroes, from Ian Curtis to Johnny Marr to the Gallagher brothers were and are devout City fans.

To follow City was to take a path more unpredictable and obscure and interesting: it was to not jump on the bandwagon of success and ambition and and ever-escalating ticket prices. And what City lacked in silverware they made up for in charisma. They had had on their books Malcolm Allison, the great dandy of English football. In fact, they sacked Allison, once the darling of the Maine Road fans, early in that ill-fated FA Cup final season.

And was there ever a more graceful moment in English football than the April day in 1974 when Denis Law, idol of Manchester United’s glorious 1960s but now wearing the sky blue of City, flicked the back heel which consigned (or so he believed at that minute; United would have dropped regardless) his former club to the Second Division?

It was, of course, the last goal Law ever scored in the league and the flicker of regret that crossed his face afterwards and his refusal to celebrate spoke volumes. He was immediately substituted. That state of play was just an aberration and United would soon return with a vengeance while City ticked along in the usual vein, some seasons bigger than others.

Now, all has changed. The infusion of limitless money from Dubai, the arrival of a dazzling cast of players and a debonair manager in Roberto Mancini; these are heady days for City fans. They still sing Blue Moon, the lovelorn classic which suited perfectly when they were the working class heroes of Manchester football but which seems a bit stretched now they have all these riches and can mark their night games with a flashy lunar projection in the City of Manchester Stadium.

And they are locked in what might be a classic local title race against United and it is starting to look as if they are not going to fade away. Winning a title once in a blue moon is all very well. But what happens if Manchester City begin to emulate the other crowd and become serial winners and attract a legion of nouveau fans? What then? Is there even room in one Northern city for two dominant clubs if City rise? Could life ever be sane again?

It remains to be seen.

Strange that Tottenham Hotspur should be there in the shadows on the very season that Manchester City look all set for new glory. Maybe they will return to haunt them one more time. But it is March now and City have the air and strut of champions elect and all is well for their long suffering fans.

Still, they should be careful what they wish for.