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What a way to start the season. City’s favourite striker smashing home in style. So that’s enough about Teemu Pukki against Motherwell, I’ll move rapidly on to events at Carrow Road! I tried to write a Mardle last week, I really did. But I expect I’ll get little sympathy when I reveal that the reason for my failure was because I was on a Greek Island with unworkable WiFi coverage. This week I have no such excuse. So I missed the dreadful injury to poor Ali Ahmed. It seems incredible that this is the third ACL that the club has had in nine months, but there seems little in common between each individual occurrence on the face of it. The only connection I can think of is that Mirko Topic and Ante Crnac were unfit due to last season’s peculiar preparation, so their bodies were under extra stress, as was Ali Ahmed’s after playing without a proper break for at least 12 months. Each injury was tragic, but Ahmed had been so instrumental in City’s upsurge after January and is such an ebullient character; this one seems to have hit everyone particularly hard. The best thing the fans can do for Ahmed is to continue to chant his name alongside his great friend Mo Touré, as they did on Saturday. The Club are, apparently, exploring both internal and external options to plug the gap. Saturday saw Oscar Schwartau, the obvious candidate, start the game on the left and Paris Maghoma end the game there. There is of course another option for City, who on the face of it should be good ‘on the wing’, however his skills were a little immature both against Osasuna and MK Dons. I am, of course, referring to Sammy the Seagull (AKA Steven Seagull). Seemingly, the Club tried to shoo him out of the ground this week, but he showed no interest – he cannot fly high enough yet to take the aerial route out. Where is Jonny Howson when you need him? As for the actual football, what a difference a year makes. Exactly a year ago, I wrote about City’s opening day loss and used the phrase ‘all as a result of tired bodies and tired minds’ to describe City’s poor moments – of which there were plenty. Against MK Dons City were the polar opposite. They were sharp, aggressive, dominating and fit. The visitors, with the caveat of their lower league credentials, were only able to compete for very short periods of the game. The scoreline flattered them. It may be different against a peer adversary, but whenever City attacked, they had pace to burn. Twice Kenny McLean threaded balls through to Touré, who left the defender in his wake. Once he smashed home, the next time the ball dribbled agonisingly wide. They had no answer and quickly modified their high backline accordingly – but by then the damage was done. If you had said at the end of last season, that Harry Darling would be edging it as first choice partner to José Cordoba, you may well have got some curious looks, and perhaps people suggesting that you had spent too long in the sun. But Darling has excelled in pre-season and looks to be a key component in City’s attacking strategy. His raking diagonal balls, exploiting the space between full-back and centre-half, were much in evidence and key to City moving the ball quickly up the pitch and into threatening areas. Clearly, Schwartau is a very different player to Ahmed, but he still proved a constant threat to the visitors’ back line. New signing, Andre Brooks, was causing similar issues on the opposite wing. I didn’t see as much classic wing play as I expected, but there is no doubting the impact the new signing had on the game. His tenacious tackle and quick-thinking ball forward set the move in motion for the second goal. He ‘scored’ City’s third, albeit off the heel of Ben Chrisene, who got the official credit, and then his quick reactions to intercept a poor backpass and clinical finish rounded off the day for City. The only black mark was his goal celebration, which earned him not only a yellow card, but the wrath of Philippe Clement – rather him than me on that front. Another recipient of Clement’s ire was, I suspect, Matej Jurasek. Big Phil remarked on players wanting to score for themselves rather than think about the team, and the most blatant example was Jurasek’s run from the right corner of the box, across the entire width of the penalty box to cut in on the left and get a shot away. You can understand his desire to impress and open his account for the season, but in doing so, he may have achieved the opposite effect. City will face tougher tests this season, of that there is no doubt. But as they say, you can only beat what is in front of you and in reality, this game was probably a decent hors-d’œuvres for the real business next weekend. It is a game I am looking forward to, not only because it marks the start of a potentially exciting league campaign, but also because it marks my debut at Carrow Road as a season-ticket holder! I won’t make all the home games, so there may be a pair of tickets available on occasion. It was impressive to see a crowd of 20,000+ for a Carabao Cup game at the weekend, many of them at Carrow Road for the first time and in good voice too. So this week I’ll send you to Scooter and ‘Hello! (Good To Be Back)’