ENGLISH PREMIER LEAGUE:WHEN GLENN Whelan talks about the six years he spent with Manchester City it feels like a period that has been airbrushed from the club's history.
The Stoke City midfielder was a youngster with tomorrow’s FA Cup final opponents at a time when home matches were played at Maine Road, Kevin Keegan was in charge and Jon Macken and Darren Huckerby were leading the attack against Total Network Solutions in the Uefa Cup.
Whelan made his one and only appearance for City against the Welsh minnows at the Millennium Stadium in 2003, in a qualifying-round tie the Premier League club won 7-0 on aggregate. The Irishman played the final 17 minutes, coming off the bench along with another couple of academy graduates, Joey Barton and Shaun Wright-Phillips, who was in his first spell at the club and could be up against Whelan at Wembley.
While Barton and Wright-Phillips would go on to become household names with the City supporters, Whelan struggled to break through. He spent four months on loan at Bury after making his debut against TNS before returning to City to receive the sobering news from Keegan that has served as a motivation for him ever since.
“It was coming up to the end of the season, I’d been out on loan and got a taste for it,” Whelan says. “There was interest from Sheffield Wednesday and Kevin Keegan said he didn’t think I was going to break in this year or next year, so the best thing would be to go out and play games. It hurt. I was still only 20, 21. If you know they don’t want to keep you on it’s not nice. But I wanted to show people that maybe I should have been kept on.”
Whelan has gone on to become an accomplished Premier League player with Stoke and the Republic of Ireland. Three other players who came over with him from Ireland at the age of 16 – Willo Flood, Paddy McCarthy and Stephen Elliott – have gone on to make a decent living from football despite failing to make the grade at City.
He remembers the old training facilities at Platt Lane, which are a world apart from the state-of-the-art Carrington complex, and recalls the huge crowds that came to watch a team striving to get back into the Premier League after suffering the ignominy of relegation to the third tier.
Whelan, who had to bide his time at Stoke this season before commanding a regular place in midfield, admits he has always retained a soft spot for City but he would like nothing more than to beat them at Wembley.
“I was there for six years and I loved it,” says Whelan, whose last goal for Stoke was against City, 15 months ago. “When I left I always used to look out for their results. But it’s different now. It would be good to get one over on them.”
Guardian Service
