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Those long months

Here we are again. It promised to be a long three months from the time Sergio Aguero won last season’s Premier League title for Manchester City, but the new season is finally well and truly upon us with City meeting Roberto di Matteo’s new-look Chelsea — winners of the FA Cup — in the Community Shield, the traditional season curtain-raiser, at Wembley tomorrow [Sunday] afternoon.

The two sides could not have approached the 2012/13 season more differently. While the league champions have been very quiet in the transfer market, the Blues have gone back to their free-spending ways, bringing in an exciting array of attacking talent that seems to suggest that performances of grit and defiance like those that saw the team win the Uefa Champions League will give way to more expansive football full of flare and style.

How long Chelsea’s players take to gel remains to be seen, but it is clear that Roman Abramovich does not want his team to be defined by the dogged displays that brought about the first European title at the expense of more exciting and entertaining sides in the form of Barcelona of Spain and Bayern Munich of Germany. He clearly wants some swagger to their game.

It is surprising that Roberto Mancini has not yet shown his hand in this transfer market given the finances that have been splashed at Eastlands since the arrival of oil money. I hope there is no relaxation by the authorities thinking that having won the title last season, the side is good enough to repeat the feat. Nothing could be more disastrous because new signings help to energise even the good sides.

Of course, with still just under three weeks to go before the end of the transfer window, there is every indication that there will be new arrivals at City as Mancini has rightly made it clear that his current squad is not good enough to achieve its main objectives of retaining the title while at the same time going further in the Uefa Champions League than was the case last season.

Matches between City and Chelsea have tended to be exciting and the Blues almost dented the Citizens title charge last season. It will be interesting to see how tomorrow’s encounter goes, but it should never be regarded as a barometer of how the new season will pan out. So many teams have won this glorified pre-season friendly in the past without getting anything from the ensuing campaign.

Talk of friendlies, my Liverpool host Germany’s Bayer Leverkusen, coached by Anfield cult hero Sami Hyppia, soon after the Community Shield match. With the Reds already two games into the new season, this represents the final match in preparation for the domestic season and there are already signs that new manager Brendan Rodgers is having his imprint on the team’s style of play.

This time next week we will be counting hours before the Premier League action returns to our screens and we shall see if the increased interest in local football that has been witnessed in the last few months is a real sign of the league’s growing appeal or whether it was only used as a substitute to the European action which has been on recess in the last quarter of a year.

It would be nice to see attendances remain high for local football because the finances would help sustain the local game, but the violent scenes seen in Lilongwe last week, like those I talked about in my last entry, will not help in that regard. People who look at sport as a form of family entertainment would never be encouraged by acts of hooligans and the sooner they were flushed out, the better for everyone.

—Feedback: gtukula@mwnation.com

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