City need Silva to strike gold
“Could that come under the description of desperation?” wondered Ferguson, in response to Patrick Vieira’s suggestion that the return of Paul Scholes showed United were desperate for reinforcements.
The most notable aspect of what Ferguson had to say was his merry, almost playful demeanour while saying it. There was none of the narrow-eyed rancour to which Ferguson can succumb when he is under pressure, and if there was any wider agenda to the remarks beyond pointing out the obvious, it may have been to demonstrate how super-relaxed he is now that his favourite time of the season has come around.
Roberto Mancini retorted that he doesn’t need to worry about what Ferguson says because he has “a big helmet” to protect him from the barbs.
Mancini is right that Ferguson’s comments will have little effect on his players, and it is probably also true that underneath the helmet, Mancini’s own mind will be preoccupied with other questions.
Questions like, why has the most talented squad in the division got the yips just as the league title is in sight? City do have the best squad, and in a sense that is part of the problem Mancini has failed to solve.
While United’s resources are so thin that their first choice line-up has recently become more predictable than at any time in the last five years, Mancini has many players who think they should be in the team, and few whose performances justify automatic selection.
Ferguson’s group clearly has more internal cohesion, partly because so many of them are comparatively junior Manchester United players and well aware of it. Danny Welbeck or Javier Hernandez are never going to complain if Ferguson tells them they’re starting on the bench. Mancini can’t rely on his older, richer, more self-important squad players to show the same forbearance.
The team’s stagnation is surely bound up with the form of David Silva, whose performances in the autumn outshone the likes of Robin van Persie and Wayne Rooney.
Now he has disappeared. He got seven goals and 17 assists in 32 matches until the end of January. Since then he has played 10 matches, scored one goal, and created none.
His contribution against Stoke was restricted to losing the plot after Dean Whitehead got away with hitting him in the head. Nobody likes being hit in the head, but these are things champions have to deal with.
Silva’s team-mates needed his inspiration, but instead he moaned and jabbered until Mancini eventually subbed him off, as he has in each of the last four matches.
In the autumn Silva was hailed as the closest the Premier League had to Messi, but lately we’ve seen why comparisons with Barcelona’s genius are so far-fetched.
“I’ve always had this ability to get up and get on with it,” Messi told Graham Hunter in his book Barca: the Making of the World’s Greatest Team.
“Long ago I made up my mind that the fact people try to kick and foul you comes with the territory if you play the way I do. Usually the attacks are not malicious... you are concentrating so deeply on winning that most times you barely even notice what has happened.”
Maybe it was Silva’s bad luck to grow up with just one [much] younger brother. Messi grew up playing against his two older brothers, who “would always know how to start a fight with me by saying things they knew I hated.
“If I lost they would tease and pinch me until I cried... they taught me to hate losing”.
Whatever the reason, City need Silva to rediscover his cojones in the next eight matches. Yet there is now an imposing pair of obstacles on his road to redemption in the form of the giant cojones of Carlos Tevez.
Tevez has never lacked for what in Argentina they call “eggs”, indeed at times they seem to dictate his entire decision-making process. He has been a champion everywhere he has played. There is no question he can handle the pressure. But can he play effectively with Silva? Last season, when Tevez was City’s key man, Silva was a somewhat spectral presence, decorative rather than decisive. He only blossomed into the outstandingly productive playmaker of last autumn after Tevez fell out with Mancini and out of the team. It is tempting to conclude that the two of them are incompatible.
Mancini would surely never have turned back to Tevez had Silva’s form not collapsed. Yet there is no guarantee that Tevez, after his four-month golfing holiday, can immediately start producing the goals and assists City need. The City team that looked so sure of itself in September and October has unravelled into something resembling chaos.
No wonder Ferguson looks so pleased with himself.
