Man City fans have already done what the players need to at Tottenham

Tottenham away in the FA Cup is in some ways a game that every Manchester City fan would want to attend.

There's the chance to see Pep Guardiola and his Treble winners, the hope of another masterclass from the newly-fit Kevin De Bruyne, and maybe even the return of Erling Haaland. Then there's the twisted pleasure of going to a stadium where you haven't even seen your title-winning machine of a football club even score a goal in five attempts, never mind get a result.

A bigger allocation was also a draw, with the 15 per cent granted to away teams for the FA Cup meaning nearly 9,000 Blues could make the trip down. Fans started to think about whether they could maybe take family members to their first game, or if they could make a weekend out of the game.

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Then came the broadcasters, decreeing that one of the landmark ties of the round would instead require City fans to make the journey down in time for an 8pm kick-off on Friday night. With the start of the match a real squeeze to make it for unless you can afford to take at least some of Friday off work, and the end of the match coming after the last train for the night has departed Euston for Piccadilly, suddenly a trip so many were looking forward to became a headache.

News then that City have sold out not only their initial allocation but the full set of nearly 9,000 tickets in the first day of making them available has come as more of a surprise than it would have done then. There were some Spurs fans who didn't expect them all to go before it was made a Friday night, and the problems caused by the rescheduling