It's been a couple of days that have had English football thinking and talking. Columnist and dyed-in-the-wool Chelsea fan Giles Smith gives his personal take on events.

It's Robinho I feel a bit sorry for. I think he wanted to come to Chelsea, you know. Certainly, at that press conference he called, as recently as Sunday, he never mentioned anything about wanting to hook up with Danny Mills. His 'head was at Stamford Bridge,' he said. We all know what that feels like.

And then look what happened to him: gazumped. A 'dream move' to Manchester City, instead of Chelsea? Who has that kind of dream and how much cheese are they eating? It would be like wanting a BMX bike for Christmas and getting a tangerine and a walnut. It's like all your Christmases not coming at once.

And how badly did Manchester City want Robinho, specifically? They seemed to be trying to get Dimitar Berbatov just a few minutes earlier, making one wonder whether the club's prime motivation, on that extraordinary last day of the transfer window, was in carefully adding to their squad, in accordance with plans thoughtfully formulated during the summer, or in simply making the biggest possible splash in the following morning's newspapers.

Again, poor old Robinho. It's worse than getting a tangerine and a walnut, in fact. It's getting the tangerine and the walnut that your brother didn't want. And then being told you're going to spend the next year being the hood ornament on the family car.

Silly price, though. I mean, clearly, if Robbie Keane is worth £20 million, then almost any member of the Real Madrid squad, including probably the manager of the club shop, must be worth upwards of £70 million, with a minimum wage of £90,000 per week over five years and a percentage of their image rights.

But Robbie Keane isn't worth £20 million. We know that. It was just a mad act of perspective-free panic committed by Liverpool in order to brighten a fairly overcast summer for the rest of us. And accordingly, £32.5 million for Robinho? Well, let's see, while quietly noting that 80 percent of Real Madrid fans were perfectly happy to see him go, according to a poll in Spain.

In any case, the important point is that we've been through the era of the 'Chelsea price' - a period in which the seller thought of a figure and then doubled it because it was Chelsea. The peak distortion point probably came with the transfer of Shaun Wright-Phillips from, funnily enough, Manchester City. I mean, lovely bloke and everything - but £21 million for a winger who hadn't finished learning how to cross?

And the lesson of Monday, it seems, is that we are now firm in our determination not to play that game, which is good news - and not just for us, but for the whole of football. The principled refusal to get into a dumb, wad-waving bidding war was a noble one. If it comes down to Chelsea to stand up proudly for fiscal prudence in these straitened times, then so be it.

Good luck to City, though - a club transformed within the space of a few hours, apparently. Paul Dickov out, Robinho in. That was some Monday. And given that the grand plan is clearly, to some extent, to cause the sweat to rise at Old Trafford, then clearly this is a project whose aspirations we can all share.

Step up and join us, I say. There's always room for one more, I think. There certainly is if Arsenal move over.

At the same time, one would perhaps take this brave notion more seriously if the first image that came to mind, when one thought of City, was a mighty, footballing one, rather than a clip from the The Benny Hill Show. Or, to put it another way, it would help if one could close one's eyes and imagine City's new owners waking a sleeping giant, rather than waking someone who runs around around in fast motion with his clothes falling off.

Of course, City are now officially 'a massive club' (copyright all reports) and people are inevitably drawing comparisons with the arrival of Roman Abramovich at Chelsea on that heady summer's day in 2003. But one can spot a few essential differences. For one thing, Roman Abramovich may have been a new name to most of us at the time, but he was, at least, immediately identifiable as an individual, private purchaser.

By contrast, this latest buy-out in Manchester has been performed by one of those dreaded 'consortiums' - a word no football fan ever had to use as little as five years ago and which no football fan has ever smiled while saying. In this case, the consortium may or may not have a royal family in Abu Dhabi at the end of it - a City-mad, scrapbook-toting, Mike Summerbee-loving royal family who have named all their children Colin Bell, the fans have to hope, rather than a bunch of cold-eyed wealth-gatherers. But, at this stage, we just don't know.

Another difference: when Abramovich arrived (and this isn't often enough said), it continued a revival of Chelsea's fortunes on the pitch that had begun a decade earlier, in 1993, with the appointment as manager of Glenn Hoddle, and which had already seen the club, after a quarter of a century of abject potlessness, achieve consistent top six finishes in the league, some presence in the Champions League, and victories in the FA Cup and Cup Winners' Cup.

In other words, the club was undeniably transformed by new and unforeseen wealth in 2003, but (critical point here) there was already something in place that could be transformed.

Manchester City, by contrast, have spent the best part of 30 years now, dashing from one comical foot-shooting incident to another, leading a one-team campaign for the return of the days of good old music hall entertainment and generally boiling themselves in a bag, over and over again.

There's quite a lot of work to do, is all we're saying, and some of that is work which (whisper this bit) has nothing to do with money at all.

Still, as we say, good luck to them. And good luck to Robinho, too, to whom our thoughts inevitably go out at this time. We wish him, in particular, well. After his debut, obviously.