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13th May 2017
03:49pm BST

Then steps up Joey Barton. For anyone else, this would be the dumbest day of his footballing career – but for Joey, it’s merely just another incident. Carlos Tevez goes down – perhaps a touch softly – from contact with Barton, and then after seeing red Barton goes Super Saiyan, kicking Sergio Augero and trying to head-butt Vincent Kompany.
And yet, despite the extra man, City continue to capitulate. Jamie Mackie makes the single greatest off-the-ball run I have ever seen to get on the end of a Taye Taiwo cross, and somehow everything has gone insane and we were beating Man City, away. 25 minutes later, we’re still in the lead, and it’s full time at the Stadium of Light.
You all know what happened next. Dzeko and Augero both scored in injury time. At the time, we still didn’t know the Bolton score. 55,000 people checking their phones at the same time meant there was no network. Apparently some of the QPR players that were on the side near the bench did know that they had only drawn with Stoke, meaning the result didn’t matter, but not all of them. You all remember Augero celebrating. I just remember Clint Hill punching the Eithad turf in utter despair.
Quite quickly though, it came through that we were fine. It was a relief, not only that we were safe, but also because it meant I could enjoy one of the greatest sporting moments of my life as a neutral, and as a football fan. I’ve nether experienced a bigger sense of collective euphoria anywhere, let alone between rival football fans. People say that City buying the league destroys the soul of football, but only 13 years earlier the City fans had seen their team playing in League One (It was actually QPR who had relegated them in 1998). Say what you want about any plastic fans who’ve popped up in the last five years, but the jubilation on the faces of those supporters was real.
Sometimes I kind of wish I’d watched it like most of my friends did, seeing it play out from both Sunderland and Manchester, in real time, on split screen on Sky, or with several laptop in front of them. We really didn’t know quite how incredible it all was until it was all over.