By going public on the Carlos Tevez no-show, the manager will be under increasing pressure as long as the Argentinian is around
Troublesome footballers are rarely sacked. More often than not they are sold or in extreme cases given free transfers. Either way there is almost always another club willing to take them on, baggage and all.
But who on earth would want to buy Carlos Tevez after the Munich business? Probably the same people who have shown an interest in him before, except that they would now expect to get the player at a much reduced price.
Tevez may not be a fan of the Marx Brothers but his theme song could well be Groucho's old number Hello, I Must Be Going. That employers have been prepared to accommodate his whims and mood changes is in its way a tribute to what he offers on the field, which is total commitment and the knack of winning matches. His combination of skill, pace and a strong physical presence has made him admirably suited to the intensity of the Premier League.
Which is why Manchester City signed him from Manchester United, where he had won Premier and Champions League honours before the feet began to itch. At Eastlands City's habit of signing up every gifted footballer going had forced Tevez down the pecking order before he remained rooted to the bench at the Allianz Arena on Tuesday as his manager, Roberto Mancini, tried to salvage something from an evening that had gone badly wrong, Bayern having led 2-0 at half-time.
What actually happened after Mancini had told Tevez to get warmed up has become obfuscated in the mists of assertion and denial. Mancini said after the match that the player had refused to go on. Tevez has since claimed that he did nothing of the kind and that the incident arose out of a misunderstanding due to language difficulties.
Even if the exchange involved Italian, Spanish and broken English it is hard to see how an instruction to warm up could be misinterpreted. Tevez's plea that he was already warmed up, whereupon Mancini is supposed to have said that if he did not warm up he could not play, recalls Basil Fawlty's dealings with Manuel: "This ball, that pitch, this smack on head!"
City's decision to suspend Tevez for a fortnight, the maximum allowed in the Premier League, shows the club believe the player has a case to answer. Mancini's priority is to repair the mood in the dressing room which even without the Tevez affair would have been in danger of fracturing following Edin Dzeko's petulant reaction to being substituted.
Before City went to Munich the English season was enjoying the prospect of the two Mancunian dreadnoughts slugging it out for the Premier League title. At the moment Manchester City would appear to possess the might of that old favourite with bawdy balladeers, The Good Ship Venus.
Ructions between managers and players tend to be kept in-house and by going public on Tevez so soon after the game Mancini has made himself a hostage to fortune, whatever the rights and wrongs. The longer Tevez is still around, the greater will be the pressure on the manager's authority.
The reaction of the football public and pundits towards Tevez has generally been scathing and nobody has summed things up better than Graeme Souness: "He epitomises what the man in the street thinks is wrong with modern footballers." When George Eastham went on strike at Sunderland in the early 1960s as a protest against the retain-and-transfer system, he enjoyed the nation's sympathy. Tevez has earned its condemnation.
In football, however, it is dangerous to assume that words will be backed by deeds. Towards the end of 1974 Keith Weller refused to take the field after half-time for Leicester City, then managed by Jimmy Bloomfield, against Ipswich and left the ground before the end of the game, which Leicester lost 1-0. He was put on the transfer list and fined two weeks' wages.
John Bond, in charge at Norwich, wrote to other managers asking them to blacklist Weller. "Here is a chance for managers to unite," he declared. "If Weller is allowed to get away with this there is nothing to stop any other player who fancies a move doing exactly the same." In the event Weller stayed at Filbert Street for another four years.
City could do worse than erect a billboard by the westbound carriageway of the M56 depicting a rear view of Tevez above the words: "You are now leaving Manchester."
That would tickle Sir Alex Ferguson.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2011/sep/30/carlos-tevez-manchester-city-roberto-mancini
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