AS LUCK WOULD have it, Nicky Weaver finds himself in Turkey this week.
But it’s a time for family rather than football for the Manchester City cult hero.
He will not be in Istanbul for the Champions League final with Inter Milan, instead he will make do with pulling up a seat in the hotel bar at a resort a couple of hours away.
Still, there can be no escape from history.
Not during a time like this, with his old club on the brink of matching Manchester United’s historic Treble feat having already clinched the Premier League title before beating their greatest rivals with a comfortable 2-1 victory in the FA Cup final last Saturday.
“There were about a dozen City fans in the hotel bar watching that game too,” Weaver tells The 42. “I was with my family and most of them were with theirs so it was pretty relaxed, it’s not like there were thousands of them.
“The kids were all there with their Haaland shirts,” he laughs, remembering his own flowing blonde locks two decades ago. “I was a bit more Jason Donovan than Haaland; I had the curtains too, still waiting for them to come back into fashion but no sign yet. I thought it looked alright at the time but not so sure now.”
Such achievements for City would have also seemed implausible when Weaver, at the end of his first season in the first team, wrote his name into the history books during that incredible Division Two play-off final at Wembley 24 years ago.
It just so happened to come four days after United lifted the Champions League trophy following that most dramatic of comebacks against Bayern Munich in Barcelona in 1999.
It was typical of City in that era that their own remarkable turnaround was completely overshadowed.
Even London was even drenched in rain that May, rather than the usual blistering end-of-season sun, when they scored twice in five minutes of stoppage time to force extra-time after Tony Pulis’s Gillingham Town had gone 2-0 up with goals in the 81st and 87th minute.
Weaver then saved the first and last penalties in the shootout, the latter leading to a celebration that has also gone down in lore, leapfrogging the advertising hoardings behind the goal before taking off in the opposite direction for a sprint the length of the pitch while his teammates attempted to catch him.
“It was a special time in my life and the highlight of my career,” Weaver recalls. “I was still so young and didn’t appreciate it, but the fact people still talk about it now and people at the club still say how much they appreciate it and what it means to them, that means a lot.
“Don’t get me wrong, they’d hardly want to change where they are now but maybe for some City fans it makes the story more romantic for them where they are now and where they were then.”
Prior to Weaver departing for Turkey with his family, he actually found himself back at Wembley the day before the 24th anniversary of that milestone moment.
Now the head of academy goalkeeping for Sheffield Wednesday, with a focus on the U18s and U23s, the 44-year-old watched from the stands as the Owls delivered another piece of third tier play-off magic.
As penalties beckoned in the League One final once again – just as they did in ’99 – Josh Windass scored a stunning diving header in the 123rd minute.
“Whenever I hear Wembley mentioned or get the chance to go, so many happy memories just come flooding back,” Weaver adds.
So much has changed from his era between the posts, retiring from playing while at Aberdeen in 2014 after 19 years as a professional. The arrival of Pep Guardiola to City in 2016 has only hastened a revolution for goalkeepers.
“It’s high risk and goalkeeping on the edge. Pep has moved it to another level. It’s phenomenal. Pep has changed the game forever. Everyone wants to play like that. It was always a case in my day that a goalkeeper had to be six foot four. Could you take a cross? How far could you kick it? Now we take it for granted that the best goalkeeprs are the ones who are so comfortable in possession they make some of the hardest things look easy.
“Their touch, how they recieve passes, where they recieve passes, and being the ones to break lines by threading passes between the lines when they are being closed down by two players. It’s a different game.
“And even when they do go long, they are drilling balls with total accuracy, or they can dink passes, clip it out wide. Goalkeepers now are like golfers who have every club in the bag.”
Guardiola made his mark quickly at City, disposing of Joe Hart, then England’s number one, in one of his first acts because he was not capable of providing that variety while also ensuring there was that sense of calm throughout the team.
Claudio Bravo was a stop-gap in that first Guardiola season, which saw them finish third, but once Ederson arrived in the summer of 2017, an era of domestic dominance ensued with five Premier League titles in six years.
Given the Premier League announced 115 charges of alleged financial breaches against the club in February, a shadow continues to linger over this success.
But in a position where the spotlight is always fixed, Weaver has nothing but admiration for the Brazilian.
“It’s that calmness he has on the ball and the total trust his teammates have in him. They ping balls at him like he’s Kevin De Bruyne or [Ilkay] Gundogan because they know he can deal with them.
“He always wants to be positive and go forward with his passing but he also has those fundementals you have to learn as a goalkeeper from an early age. His feet are sharp to react, and he can judge to be in the right positons.
“When he does need to be commanding he is top class with his hands, in a one-on-one situation you back him because of how he works angles and his timings to close space. Ederson really is the complete goalkeeper.”
In his own role at Wednesday, overseeing promising players in that position for the future, the demands of Weaver’s work have been changed utterly by Guardiola’s methods.
Not that it’s as simple as just working off the Ederson model. “You can’t. People and players are unique, they have different ways of learning, of working, and are individualds in their own right.
“So you have to tweak things to bring the best out of them and help them learn. They are all their own people.”
Weaver may be part of a City that is also unrecongisable, but his own contribution remains.