Dubai Blue
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<a class="postlink" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2010/oct/06/carlos-tevez-roberto-mancini-man-city" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2010 ... i-man-city</a>
And a good opinion piece on it from Paul Wilson:
<a class="postlink" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2010/oct/06/carlos-tevez-manchester-city" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog ... ester-city</a>
Succinctly puts lie to Gooney's ridiculous assertion that no player would ever have a disagreement with Ferguson at half-time.
Edit: And shove your Titanic/Neil Armstrong pictures up your arse if they've already been posted ;-)
Roberto Mancini has confirmed he had an angry exchange with Carlos Tevez over tactics at half-time of Manchester City's game against Newcastle United but insisted there was no lingering bad feeling between himself and the Argentinian.
Mancini had reacted aggressively when he heard Tevez making a derogatory comment in Spanish as he came into the dressing room. The subsequent row became so heated that at one point Tevez was told he was being substituted and started removing his kit. Team-mates and coaching staff eventually intervened but Mancini made it clear he would not hold any grudges when Tevez returns from the international break.
"What happened in our dressing room happens in others as well. And when it matters it is good that it happens. Against Newcastle we had gone to sleep in the first half, so the confrontation with Tevez was exactly the alarm call everybody needed.
"The confrontation with Tevez was really ballsy. And in the second half City deservedly won. The alarm call worked well. We [Mancini and Tevez] sorted everything between us before the restart. And when I took him off at the end we shook hands again. Now and then a good shake-up is healthy."
Mancini described as "bollocks" one report that he had insulted Tevez's mother and confirmed, as revealed in the Guardian, that it was actually about the team's tactical formation, with his leading scorer frustrated about playing as a lone striker throughout the early part of the season.
This system, he said, would change shortly. "It's out of necessity. [Emmanual] Adebayor has just recovered from injury, [Mario] Balotelli not so. Without flying full backs like [Jérôme] Boateng and [Aleksandar] Kolarov, who can push forward, I've had to adjust the team to get results and stay in touch with the leaders. But only until everyone is back and fit."
To make his point, Mancini went on to say that Tevez should be regarded alongside the likes of leading Serie A strikers such as Samuel Eto'o and Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
"Tevez is up there with them. He scores in the big matches, he fights against defenders 6ft4 tall, he has quality and grit. But a great side cannot depend on one player only." He had made him captain, he said, "because I want him to improve in all respects, he has the potential and he is improving."
Tevez's relationship with Mancini has been frayed at times since the Italian replaced Mark Hughes, with the player on record as saying there should not have been a change of manager, as well as criticising the new training methods.
In particular, he has objected to Mancini's habit of arranging a double session every Tuesday when there is no midweek match, but the former Internazionale manager rejected the criticism. "It's a myth. I've imposed double training sessions only three or four times last season and not once this season. Yet the media go on and on with this."
Speaking to Gazzetta dello Sport, Mancini was asked to explain his recent remarks about Adam Johnson, a player whose attitude has been questioned by the City coaching staff.
"Adam is young, but he has got what it takes. He just needs to understand it is not enough to dribble past an opponent six times to feel entitled to think he reached the top. You need to dribble but you also need a cutting shot like the goal against Juve [in the Europa League], or the 2-1 win against Newcastle. If I didn't believe in Adam's potential I would not work him like this."
Mancini was also asked about Nigel de Jong's leg-breaking tackle on Newcastle's Hatem Ben Arfa and the midfielder's reputation now that he has been dropped from the Netherlands squad.
"I am extremely sorry for Ben Arfa, who is an extraordinary player and I sincerely hope he recovers speedily. De Jong plays with grit, but he's not dirty. He tackles hard, but never intending to hurt. Last Sunday was an accident. The referee saw it all, and did not even award a free kick against him. As for the Dutch coach, I'm not going to interfere with his decisions."
The City manager was reminded of De Jong's now-infamous kick into the ribs of Spain's Xabi Alonso during the World Cup final. "That tackle was out of order, uncoordinated in the extreme. But I hope that referees continue to evaluate De Jong with fairness."
And a good opinion piece on it from Paul Wilson:
<a class="postlink" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2010/oct/06/carlos-tevez-manchester-city" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog ... ester-city</a>
Were I a Manchester City supporter I think I would be quite encouraged by suggestions of a bust-up between Carlos Tevez and Roberto Mancini at half-time during the game against Newcastle United. For one thing Tevez did not storm off in a huff, jump into his car and drive home, or spend the rest of the afternoon looking disgruntled on the bench. He came out for the second half and City won.
Moreover, they won by dint of an attacking substitution in Adam Johnson, which is believed to be what Tevez was moaning about, so having seen his manager first replace Yaya Touré with Emmanuel Adebayor and then send on Johnson for Gareth Barry, Tevez now knows he has an effective channel of communication and that Mancini is not afraid to make changes.
It could be argued that starting a home game with three defensive-minded midfielders was taking caution a bit too far, considering Blackpool on the same day were profitably setting out their stall to attack Liverpool from the outset at Anfield, but Mancini may not be as inflexible as people think and could even be coming round to the view that football in England is played a little differently than in Italy.
Be that as it may, the main reason City should take a relaxed view of tempers snapping in the dressing room is that it shows the club cares. Plenty of people maintain the only thing that matters to City's expensively assembled squad is the bottom line on the wage slip, but when members of a team are falling out among themselves at the same time as they are climbing to second in the Premier League it tells you that ambition has finally arrived at Eastlands. The real thing, not just the easy soundbite. The captain falling out with the manager over tactics should not be mistaken for just the latest bit of slapstick in the endless City comedy show, this is the development that shows how much has changed at the club.
At considerable cost, City have imported a dressing room full of winners, and kicked out some of the whingers. Perhaps it is premature to refer to City players as winners when the trophy cupboard is still bare, yet little else in the past couple of seasons has suggested as strongly that what Mancini would call the winning mentality is taking root.
In a revealing interview with Simon Hattenstone that can be found elsewhere on these pages, Ryan Giggs briefly touches on the incident when Sir Alex Ferguson kicked a football boot and hit David Beckham in the eye. He only briefly touches on it because Giggs clearly believes that what takes place in the sanctuary of the dressing room should remain in the sanctuary of the dressing room, yet even in so doing he gives the lie to the notion that winners and champions go serenely about their business.
"What you've got to realise is that footballers, and me in particular, have seen everything in the changing room," Giggs says. "Everything. I've seen the manager kicking off with the players, the players kicking off with him, players fighting each other, managers fighting, everything."
Giggs has famously only played for one club in his professional career, only worked under one manager, so unless he has seen an awful lot of battling in his relatively infrequent outings with Wales he is talking about Manchester United here. He is making the fairly obvious point that the better and more ambitious the players a club brings together, the more they are likely to disagree about how best to achieve results. Champion players in any sport are not the ones who sit and listen to instructions then shrug if the gameplan goes awry. Champion players will normally be the ones questioning the instructions or saying "I told you so" when they go wrong.
You still find people, even the odd manager, who imagine that once you have a squad full of high-achieving internationals to call upon, all you have to do is send the right XI out on to the pitch and everything will take care of itself. Management must be easy, it is sometimes said, when you get to the level of Ferguson or Arsène Wenger.
Not so. When you have a dressing room full of proven winners, who know more than you possibly do about winning, every decision you make will be questioned, every subtle change examined sceptically, until you arrive at a situation where you are accepted as a winner too.
Even then, Giggs seems to be suggesting, you cannot bank on an easy life. That's why one can only admire Carlo Ancelotti's achievement in taking over Chelsea and winning the Double in his first season in England. Granted he took over a strong squad, but the difficulty of walking into a strange dressing room and dealing with players in a new language in a different league should not be underestimated. Ancelotti even manages to look relaxed about it all, too, and that is impressive in its own way.
Perhaps Ancelotti, like Guus Hiddink before him, simply has a knack for making management look easy, or perhaps both men were just fortunate to inherit the team structure and ethic put in place by José Mourinho. It could be said that Chelsea are too strong to go wrong, except that Luiz Felipe Scolari discovered otherwise.
Certainly the only thing likely to distract Chelsea this season, now that Ancelotti's feet are firmly under the table, is devoting too much of their attention to trying to win the Champions League. They are still the team to beat in the league, though City, who have beaten them already, are beginning to look as if they could run them closer than United this season. Arsenal have perfected the art of standing still, and presumably await the departure of Cesc Fábregas or Wenger to start their decline in earnest, while Liverpool are going from bad to worse as only once-great teams can.
What Liverpool fans would like to hear are City-type rumours of unrest, perhaps even unruliness, from the Anfield dressing room. Instead the club's plight is being agonisingly picked over by the endless list of Liverpool old boys with media platforms. That's the problem in a nutshell, really. People still care about Liverpool, but their champions are fighting in the papers and not on the pitch.
Succinctly puts lie to Gooney's ridiculous assertion that no player would ever have a disagreement with Ferguson at half-time.
Edit: And shove your Titanic/Neil Armstrong pictures up your arse if they've already been posted ;-)