Devoted Mancini a loser in love
Mancini may have been angry with Mario Balotelli, who had defied his authority in his usual infuriating way, but the person who had done most to make Mancini look foolish was Mancini himself.
At that moment, Mancini didn’t realise how foolish he would end up looking as he had no idea that somebody was snapping photographs of him with a long lens. The photographs did not actually change anything, however, beyond allowing the wider world to snigger at City’s expense. The club have since talked about the need to beef up security at their training ground, which was a red herring. The only audience that really matters was there on the training ground with Mancini and Balotelli and they had already seen the whole thing.
The relationship between Mancini and Balotelli is unusual. On the one hand they seem constantly to be at war. No player except Carlos Tevez has caused Mancini as much trouble.
Mancini has twice punishment-substituted Balotelli for attempting back-heels — against LA Galaxy in a pre-season friendly in 2011, and against Manchester United in the derby last month. When you put a player like Balotelli in your team, you expect him to try a couple of back-heels. Yet when he tries these tricks and fails, Mancini seems to take it personally.
One imagines that Mancini finds it personally embarrassing when Balotelli does stupid things because he is acutely aware of the extent to which everyone else sees Balotelli as his personal project.
Other managers from Jose Mourinho, who worked with Balotelli at Inter, to Harry Redknapp, who has never worked with him, have dismissed the player as unmanageable, and yet Mancini persists with him. The reason might be that he identifies more closely with Balotelli than with any other player. Balotelli reminds him of himself. As a player, Mancini was a super-talented hothead who was always falling out with team-mates and managers. Trevor Francis, Liam Brady and Juan Sebastian Veron all fell out with Mancini, as did the then-Italy manager Arrigo Sacchi, who stopped picking Mancini after one bust-up.
While Mancini is always substituting Balotelli or grappling with him in training or angrily announcing that he is “finished”, it is also clear that he is devoted to Balotelli. The relationship between them is as close to love as the relationship between a manager and player gets. “I will give him another 100 chances,” Mancini said after their latest tiff was exposed. “I believe he can change, I am here for this.”
In one sense it is admirable that Mancini continues to see the good in Balotelli, to believe in his talent and the possibility that one day he will be a consistently productive player. He’s like the biblical shepherd who is determined to go out and bring back his little lost sheep.
The problem is that the shepherd seems to have forgotten about the rest of the flock. Balotelli is not the only player at Manchester City, and every time he plays, a big player like Tevez or Edin Dzeko is left on the bench. These guys are watching and wondering why different rules seem to apply to the manager’s pet.
When Mancini ends up grappling with Balotelli in training it makes him look ridiculous, which cannot improve his standing in the eyes of the other players. Especially in the same week he announced City would be top of the league if only he had got Robin van Persie, rather than having to make do with City’s actual strikers.
One of Giovanni Trapattoni’s regular lines is: “I have no son in the team.” He understands how dangerous it can be for a manager to be perceived as having a favourite. By showing such endless patience with Balotelli, Mancini risks losing the other players. He might get away with it if Balotelli was scoring a goal a game. Instead he’s scored one league goal all season.
Mancini was one of the most talented players of his generation, yet spent most of his career at Sampdoria, who are not among the traditional big clubs of Italy. He helped them win their only league title in 1991, and will remain forever a legend of the club. Balotelli’s best option might be to find himself a smaller, more forgiving club, where he will be the most talented player in the team.
The modern Manchester City is no place for anyone to grow up in public.
