"Suddenly the future's gone murky and it's hard to know which is more likely: City gatecrashing the Big Four's party, or suffering an ugly meltdown"

Guardian.co.uk is running a very good series of season previews for each Premier League team, and today Paul Doyle wrote one on City.

Although the predicted finish is 9th, this was done by a team of guardian journalists and not Doyle himself, who acknowledges that "unless Thaksin's travails trigger an implosion - they should finish higher than that. Above Villa for a start."

He makes a number of good points about the team - that Tal Ben Haim will be a decent replacement (in the short and medium terms at least) for Corluka if he goes, and that the main weakness is at left back:

"Javier Garrido is accomplished going forward but his defensive positioning is comical and his tackling feeble. He's still better than Michael Ball, mind."

Doyle also mentions the possible uses for Elano, the problem of how little we score from set pieces, and writes that Vladimir Weiss "may just be the answer on the right".

Anyway, it's well worth reading. Take a look HERE.

UPDATE (01.07): There's another preview of City's season here from Football365. It seems less well informed, and, quite possibly as a consequence, much more optimistic, about the coming year. No mention of Corluka, bizarrely.