admitted that he was not keen on joining Portsmouth, but stated that he decided to take a much more professional approach to his career in terms of training and eating healthier food so as to start the 1992–93 pre-season in good physical condition; he credited his new approach to the birth of his first child. Ironically though a virus picked up on a family holiday to Saint Lucia caused him to miss a month early in the season and drained him of fitness. He recovered to build a strike partnership with Guy Whittingham, whilst midfielders Alan McLoughlin and Mark Chamberlain made an effective four-pronged attack, and with two games to go Portsmouth were top of the table and needed only to beat relegation threatened Sunderland to secure an automatic promotion place. However they lost the match 4–1 and Walsh was sent off; he wrecked the Roker Park dressing rooms in retaliation. He was suspended for the play-off games, and Portsmouth lost at the semi-final stage to Leicester City. Despite Whittingham scoring 47 league and cup goals, it was Walsh who the fans voted as their Player of the Year. With Whittingham sold, Walsh failed to build an effective partnership with new signing Gerry Creaney and Portsmouth failed to put together a promotion push for the 1993–94 season. However Walsh scored both goals in a 2–2 draw with Manchester United at Old Trafford in the League Cup, putting himself back on the radar for top-flight clubs in need of strikers. Manchester City Manchester City manager Brian Horton, his former captain at Luton, paid Portsmouth £750,000 for Walsh's services in March 1994. With star striker Niall Quinn out injured, City were fourth from bottom with eleven Premier League games left to play and Walsh's strike partner Uwe Rösler was also a new signing – and had yet to learn English. The pair soon built an understanding however, and the arrival of wingers Peter Beagrie and Nicky Summerbee gave City the attacking firepower to steer clear of the relegation zone as Walsh and Rösler scored nine goals between them in the final ten games. Horton tried to accommodate Quinn, Rösler and Walsh in the first team for the 1994–95 season, and as a result had a very strong attacking team. The "Sky Blues" were in sixth place by December, but then ten games without a win and three months without a goal for