Hmmm. I was actually writing a response as you sent yours. Oh well. For the record, my response was this:

Resurrecting articles is frowned upon, yes. We might be able to get away with it if the article we resurrect is a substantial improvement on the last one, however - though of course we both know that there's no guarantee it would ultimately be accepted whatever we did - there is an established bias towards deleting articles on individual matches. Changing the name would be nice but I'm not sure what we would change to...the game didn't really have a "name" like the Ballet on Ice or any such, and there are limited other ways of naming the article.

Making this subpage was a decent idea, you just got unlucky in that it's something that has already been tried elsewhere and ultimately voted against. Honestly I can say I've never seen a subpage for an actual mainspace article so I have no idea how much people tend to chase these articles up or whether it might just glean a community-wide shrugging of the shoulders. Certainly there's been no AfD nomination yet, which is a start. I have to say I somewhat favour making it a standalone article or merging with the season article (i.e. not keeping the subpage) but I don't have strong feelings so I'll run with whatever works. If it got categorised it would either be put into a category for something like Category:Football matches (I have no idea if that exists, it was another example) and Category:FA Cup and then probably into a new category for City matches or comebacks or somesuch where it probably would be on its own. That category would then have to be categorised so it wasn't just an orphan. I don't know what the ethic is here for creating categories with only a single article in them but I suspect it's not encouraged, so that idea might be rejected if (whoever did it) couldn't find more like-minded articles to categorise into the same. I don't think it being categorised would really affect anyone's opinion of the article though. The one thing that might affect peoples' judgement right now is that it will (in its present form) show up in categories as "2003–04 Manchester City F.C. season/Spurs 3-4 City" or however the subpage is actually named, given the / in the name.

Yes, I'd say it will currently be located in an overarching "please categorise these pages" category. I don't know how long it would take for it to get sorted, but it would probably be put somewhere generic. Better to do it ourselves, I guess.

Sorry my thoughts were a bit disjointed but I was answering the points as they came and...well, better English just didn't quite flow from my fingers as I typed. Hopefully I addressed all your points. I'll settle for just keeping the subpage if you want it, though I think that page would be best served by being redone - with as many citations as possible - and expanded upon, so we can argue a case for it being reincluded into society, so to speak. Having an article AfD'ed isn't a permanent sign that that article should never exist, it's merely a suggestion that it shouldn't exist in the state it's in. Generally speaking most articles that get deleted will be kept the second time around if their quality and/or level of detail is substantially improved.

As for the Charity Shield, I always considered it a notable trophy. Yes, it's a single game, but it requires winning a trophy to qualify in the first place (ignoring those early years when some teams refused to play). To this end, I'd consider it more of an accomplishment than winning the trophy which qualified you for it. Similarly, would you question the worthiness of the European Super Cup? In fact, because some teams initially didn't enter, City were instrumental in making the Charity Shield the respected competition it is today by taking their place in the competition twice. You could argue that of all the teams to have ever played in it, we should be the ones most ardently defending it.  Talk