Fan's view by Paul Cooper

ONE word sums up the whole Maine Road experience - joke!

From arriving an hour before the game to find we were crushed into the uncovered seats on the scaffold in the corner of the stadium - without enough plastic ponchos to go round - to leaving at the end of a woeful performance by the Wanderers ... it was a dreadful afternoon all round.

Those of us without ponchos were left to brave the elements, which reminded me of the "good old days" at Burnden Park, except that Saturday will not go down as one of the "good old days". The performance by our lads was as miserable as the weather.

Jay Jay Okocha tried to keep the ball at his feet and use his silky skills on what was obviously a greasy pitch but his showboating, which looked good against Chelsea, just didn't work; Ricardo Gardner, looked like he was wearing my grandad's slippers - sliding and slipping all over the place - and Youri Djorkaeff just didn't produce the class he normally does.

So with three excellent players (I am a big, big fan of Gardner's) not performing, the team's performance dropped to levels we never really expected.

City were poor but we were worse, unfortunately. As someone said, we could have played all night and not scored.

After the Chelsea game I was a proud man, even though we didn't get all three points. If someone had said three weeks ago that we could have four points from the games against Leeds and Chelsea, I would have snatched his hand off but now the mood has changed.

Being a fan of Jermaine Johnson's, it was good to see him get a runout and Michael Ricketts looked quite sharp when he came on, as he did against Chelsea. It was also nice to see Danny Livesey get another taste of Premiership experience.

As I keep saying to my work colleagues who support City and United, this is a marathon and not a sprint. I have every faith in Sam Allardyce to get us out of relegation trouble.

It is an outright scandal to hear fickle fans calling for a change of management. Sam Allardyce is, for me, one of the best managers in the Premiership and, as has been proved at Leeds, Sunderland and even Ipswich, a change of manager is no guarantee of short-term success.

On Saturday we have a very big local derby against Blackburn and we need to forget about what happened at Maine Road and get everybody behind the team.

Man of the Match: Sylvain Distin - frustrating to see what we might have had.