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Manchester City fans could always lay claim to Oasis and Pep Guardiola has become one of their own after nine years at the club
Just in case it wasn't surreal enough that Oasis are back, and back in Manchester, here came Pep Guardiola wearing a retro Manchester City top singing along to their biggest hits. For plenty of Blues, it won't get better than this.
City fans have always been able to proudly call Oasis one of their own, back when the Gallagher brothers were rowdy upstarts feeding into the Maine Road frenzy. A generation of players grew up with the pair idolising them as they made them VIPs at the Hacienda or wherever they played before shooting into superstardom.
The music outlived the band and so did Noel and Liam's support for City, with the former a regular at matches for years. Don't Look Back in Anger and Wonderwall have been firm dressing room favourites over the years and Noel led the squad in singing it after they won the Premier League at Brighton in 2019.
And then there's Guardiola, a proud Catalan and one of the greatest managers to have ever graced the game of football. He will forever be bound to Oasis and Manchester by one of the worst nights the city had ever seen.
His wife Cristina and daughters Maria and Valentina were three out of thousands who happily went to see Ariana Grande at the Arena in May 2017, not knowing the horror that would unfold in a terrorist attack. Guardiola ran blindly from his city centre apartment after the line dropped as his wife tried to tell him what was happening.
Unlike others, they were fortunate enough to be reunited without any injuries but the night, and the city's response to it, would be a defining moment in the life of Guardiola at the end of his first year in Manchester. Asked to pick his six most special songs in 2018, Don't Look Back in Anger was on the list.
"I love this song, you cannot imagine how much. It is incredible. It puts me in the best of myself when I listen - it's a masterpiece," he told BBC Sport. "Every time we go out we always sing this song together. I love it.
"I like that, after what happened in Manchester at the arena, now it is a song for the people, you know? Like in the video when everyone is in silence and one woman starts to sing the song, external and everybody sings, that is a moment, it was so touching for my family and for myself."
Eight years after the attack, Guardiola is still in charge of City. He vowed to go with them down to League One if they were punished for retrospective financial breaches that the Premier League have accused them of, and signed a contract until 2027 last November after seeing some worrying signs in the team and not wanting to add to the problems.
Guardiola has turned City into one of the best football teams in world football, given the club their first ever Ballon d'Or winner, and provided memories for the fans that will last forever. Some Blues still cannot believe that he is theirs, or that they have managed to keep him for so long when he lasted just four years at his boyhood club Barcelona and three at Bayern Munich.
Last season was bruising for everyone, and the Club World Cup has seen the manager attract more criticism online. He must face his doubters next season when the Premier League starts again and City will be expected to win it.
Until then, all City fans can marvel at just what they have given to Guardiola. A man who should not be in his place of work in the middle of a month off was at Heaton Park on Friday night, singing and dancing with his daughters to a band that Blues could lay claim to long before the takeover.
Already synonymous with one of the great British bands, City can also proudly say that Pep Guardiola is a proud Blue.
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