Pe­ter Ray Blood

I swear sport is go­ing to be the end of me. Sport has bro­ken my heart even more fre­quent­ly than women, be it the So­ca War­riors, West In­dies crick­eters, Barcelona, and more re­cent­ly, Man­ches­ter Unit­ed. On Sun­day, I thought my heart would leap out of my chest as I watched Man­ches­ter City wrench the Eng­lish Pre­mier­ship League (EPL) ti­tle out of Man­ches­ter Unit­ed's hands, just a mere 91 sec­onds af­ter it seemed to be a done deal for the Red Dev­ils. Not since our very own Dwight Yorke per­formed a mir­a­cle in time added on for Man­ches­ter Unit­ed, in the 1999 Cham­pi­ons League fi­nal against Bay­ern Mu­nich, have I seen such a nail-bit­ing ti­tle-de­cider like Sun­day's game be­tween City and Queen's Park Rangers.

With five min­utes added on to the game, up to the stroke of 91 min­utes, Unit­ed was the league cham­pi­on, hav­ing de­feat­ed Sun­der­land 1-0, un­til City's Ser­gio Aguero etched his place in foot­ball his­to­ry by con­vert­ing the win­ning goal, giv­ing his team a 3-2 vic­to­ry over QPR. City de­serves this ti­tle hav­ing de­feat­ed Unit­ed twice dur­ing the sea­son, in­clud­ing a 6-1 drub­bing. That de­feat helped place Unit­ed in a no-win sit­u­a­tion, as, with the ti­tle to be even­tu­al­ly de­cid­ed on goal dif­fer­ence, and with both teams locked on 86 points, goals against would be a crit­i­cal de­cid­ing fac­tor. And so, the his­to­ry has been writ­ten. On Sun­day, City copped its first league ti­tle in 44 years, jus­ti­fy­ing club own­er Sheik Man­sour bin Za­yed Al Nahyan's US$1 bil­lion in­vest­ment. But, de­spite de­feat this time around, Unit­ed has sig­nif­i­cant brag­ging rights hav­ing won 12 of the last 19 Eng­lish ti­tles. City has won the ti­tle on three oc­ca­sions. In the last 20 years, the on­ly oth­er teams to win the Eng­lish league ti­tle have been Black­burn Rovers, Ar­se­nal and Chelsea.

Pan in the air

As far as lo­cal en­ter­tain­ment goes pan re­mains on the front burn­er, de­spite re­cent vis­its from some big names in US mu­sic.

To­mor­row as well, the Laven­tille Steel­band Foun­da­tion is stag­ing its ea­ger­ly await­ed bi­en­ni­al, 8 of Hearts, pro­duc­tion at the Laven­tille Com­plex, on the An­gos­tu­ra Com­pound, in Suc­cess Vil­lage. Per­form­ing 45-minute reper­toires will be the top steel­bands of this year's Na­tion­al Panora­ma com­pe­ti­tion, with the ex­cep­tion of PCS Sil­ver Stars. Star­lift Steel Or­ches­tra is al­so host­ing its West­ern-style, fund-rais­ing bar­be­cue lime, Howdy Pard­ner, Sad­dle Up and Ride on over to the Steel Q, to­mor­row, at 7 pm. It's be­ing held at Star­lift House of Mu­sic, lo­cat­ed at 1A Mu­cu­rapo Road Ex­ten­sion, in Wood­brook, and lots of live en­ter­tain­ment is billed.

In oth­er pan news, Sapo­phon­ics Steel of Care­nage is sched­uled to make its in­au­gur­al con­cert tour of New York City, from June 23.