Alex Livesey/Getty ImagesManchester City manager Roberto Mancini fields questions from the media prior to City's midweek Champions League clash.

"When the dust settles...", a football phrase the great and good of the game enjoy employing when another of those little problems has arisen without warning, scattering good sense and decorum to the four compass points. In the case of Chelsea, Manchester City's illustrious yet suddenly ramshackle opponents this weekend, waiting for the dust to settle might need the patience of Job, such is the cloud of detritus constantly flying around the polished chrome and steel of Stamford Bridge. Despite the well-meaning hustle and bustle of a veritable army of hoover-wielding flunkies, City fans rich enough to entertain the trip to West London on Sunday might well be advised to take their own cloth and dusters on the long trip south.

There is, of course, still some "dust settling" over the Etihad too and all those tea towels are no doubt being put to good use to waft away any malodorous gusts still clinging to the portals. This then is the mangled wreckage, the contorted mess that our Blatter-Platini-Scudamore sculpted football juggernaut has wrought on Chelsea, a great footballing institution, awash with instability and rumour, pickled in unsustainable desire to be top of the tree, kings of the pile, barons of all they survey. And of all people to have to welcome to their tumbling fortress at the weekend, but the Premier League's other "wealthy failures", City.

For Chelsea and their generous owner, the phrase "Champions League Humiliation" is just about the limit. For City too, new and wondrous as this kind of executive level affront is compared to the Jason van Blerk flavoured belly laughs the club was causing a decade or so ago, the time is fast closing in when this kind of slap in the face with the world watching will not be tolerated either. The present that ties these two clubs together is a swirling vortex of jealousy, tabloid-sniping and name-calling from the good folk in the stands, but it may yet develop into a future separated by patience in one place and an apparent absence of it in the other.

If present difficulties of adapting to newly raised expectation levels are shared, the past too offers a plethora of interesting parallels.

Come back with me if you will to the early seventies, to the days of trousers so flared that they could trip up a passing bulldog, sideburns that would grace a werewolf and a football scene as hip as it was battered by violence. City and Chelsea, blessed with their Summerbees and Hudsons, Marshes and Cookes, strutted their funky stuff in the full glow of the flashlights. European darlings both, in 1970, champions and cup winners (in City's case both, plus a league Cup), the late sixties and early seventies represented the last time before the present day when these two shades of blue ruled the roost together.

The late 70's brought calamity to Chelsea, as Peter Osgood morphed horrifically into Teddy Maybank and Micky Droy turned into Canary Wharf. City clung on longer, not disintegrating until the early 80's in a whiff of cordite and horse manure. Coming to rest in the 1983 version of the Championship, as it is quaintly known these days, there they met a Chelsea so down on their luck they were insisting on the likes of Johnny Bumstead and a 49-year-old Ronald Harris (now more fumbler than chopper). I recalled the brittle bones and threadbare fare that ensued when the clubs met at this level here on a day when the wind almost blew away the latest City saviour, Jim Tolmie, the first man ever to be consumed whole by his own bubble perm.

Those were dire but beautiful days. Standing on the away end at The Bridge, windswept, litter-strewn, graffiti-pocked and downright dangerous in seven or eight different ways, it made you feel vital and alive. Maybe Ken McNaught looked more suited to gridiron, maybe Colin Pates seemed ready to play Widow Twanky at the Paladium and Paul Cannoville's shooting was more likely to put in a window on the Kings Road than find the net, but it was real and it was vibrant, fresh and loud. And, if truth be told, a little bit stale too. How we loved our football uncomplicated and unsophisticated in those devilish days of yore.

Now, after the modern era resurrection of these great institutions, we find ourselves shot into a time of Machiavellian plots where rabid headlines shriek their daily bile, a world of easy come and easy Matteo, of microwave left-backs and boil-in-the-bag chairmen. A place where Russian oligarchs tread the blue carpet and Arab Sheiks bow and brood, where there is no time but plenty of money to waste. Into this stark spotlight tread the timid boys of Chelsea and City this weekend, with the pressure of the world on their narrow shoulders, overseen by an Italian (the only appointment in Sheik Mansour's time at the club) and a Spaniard (Abramovich's ninth manager in 12 years).

Perhaps here, lost in the crashing hubbub, we finally uncover a detail that makes the Two Blues different after all. With so many parallels in the last 40 years, this may just be the most crucial of differences, as Chelsea and City face an uncertain future of spending restrictions, recriminations, catcalls and loudly blown raspberries.

To he who is patient.... a gold-embossed duster

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