‘It’s a good time to be a City fan’

Lee Johnson spoke this week of how his side would “prefer to play Leeds than Burton”. I can’t think of any City fans who witnessed the frustrating draw last Friday evening that wouldn’t disagree with the manager’s assessment.

There was a little negativity across the various social media platforms I looked at following the Burton game, with the consensus being that we hadn’t played that well. I think this assessment is a bit harsh, and, given Johnson’s comments, I feel he’d think the same.

Burton came for a point and parked the proverbial bus. I don’t blame Nigel Clough for doing so and they defended resiliently. Sadly for City fans, we didn’t have the craft, guile or good fortune to wear them down. Lee will have to work on breaking such teams down, and you’d expect to see more of this – especially if City remain in the top six.

One thing that would have helped on Friday night would have been to have the option to bring on Milan Djuric to add something different to our play. Fans of our 6ft-plus Bosnian will be buoyed by the news that Djuric is due back in the next week or two and may feature in next week’s Cup squad for the Palace game.

There was more good news regarding injuries this week, too: Pisano is not too far from a first team return, which will also add to Johnson’s defensive options. Bailey Wright has deputised well in the right-back role and I would expect the Italian to regain his place soon.

Johnson is more excited about City’s prospects against Leeds because one would expect the Yorkshire club to play in an attacking style at Ashton Gate. They have started well but have stuttered of late, and sit one point behind us in the league.

Tickets for the top six game have been selling well and the Leeds end sold out sometime ago. The passion with which Leeds fans follow their club still impresses me, and from a certain point a view you could argue those loyal supporters deserve a return to the Premier League sooner rather than later.

One would hope that we don’t have a repeat of the scenes some years ago, where a number of Leeds fans bought tickets in the City end and caused chaos by letting themselves be known by celebrating when their side scoring.

City then face a Crystal Palace side that annoyingly scored their first goals of the season by beating Premier League Champions Chelsea last weekend. I would imagine there will be changes from both sides but I really hope we can continue our Carabao Cup run and reach the dizzy heights of a quarter final.

As I reflect on our two upcoming matches, I can’t help thinking it’s a good time to be a City fan. I am not one to gloat, and certainly don’t wish to add to our neighbours’ current woes, but when you think back not-too-long-ago at our repeated struggles to get out of the third tier of English football and games against teams such as Shrewsbury and Rochdale, you have to agree we’ve come a long way.

City now have two mouth-watering ties in prospect, in our picture perfect home of the gloriously refurbished Ashton Gate. Both games are likely to be witnessed by bumper crowds and I am going to make a rare prediction that we will win both matches, each by the odd goal.

Should my prediction be right, I will be writing to you next week with more glee than one ever thought possible. So, as ever, fingers crossed.