BillyShears said:
lancs blue said:
Sure his abrasive manner didn't please everyone but I think it needed that kind of approach to knock a winning mentality into the club, I just cannot understand why some posters insist on belittling everything he did at City.
It's not about belittling everything he did. It's about belittling him for not having the self awareness or respect for our owners to acknowledge their contribution to our rapid rise. Mancini's "it was all me" narrative stinks. What makes it worse is that these players he's lauding and calling his own signings now, how many of them did he want to sell because he could no longer work with them ?
None of this should preclude him from rightfully being proud of the work he carried out at City and for playing his part in our recent success. But he played a part. He couldn't have built anything without the core group he had when he arrived, and without the unstinting support of Khaldoon and Sheikh Mansour in allowing him to pick freely from the top shelf to fill his squad.
Here we go again. I think we have to realise that BBC interviews, Guardian reports and so on don't reach Paris, or they do only in their carefully edited versions. At no point was anything mentioned about the role of the Sheikh or Khaldoon, either in his time or now. I think you'll struggle to find a mention in recent interviews with Pellegrini. You will find that the only questions Mancini was asked concerned how he felt about
his work in Manchester, about reports that
he had lost the dressing room and about reports in the press saying that Pellegrini's team is much more attractive than his had been. Unsurprisingly he did not launch int a study of the Sheikh's involvement in the club yesterday, today and tomorrow. When asked about comparison's with Pellegrini's team he said that he was "very happy" because the players were those he had bought. No doubt you, Billy, jump on his claims that "he" bought them as a sign of treachery to the Sheikh, but nobody else does. He did, indisputably, play an enormous role in the building of the team. When he arrived at the club Joe Hart was on loan at Birmingham with no recall clause: Mancini got him back at the end of the season and put him in goal for the first game of the 2010-11 season against Spurs and he has remained first choice until now, with one blip. Vinnie Kompany had been injured before Christmas 2009 and had played under Hughes as a DM: Mancini immediately played him as CB and he grew to be one of the best in the world. Silva, YaYa, Nasri, Dzeko and Aguero all joined while Mancini was manager. It is right to point out that Fernandinho and Negredo came last summer and they are important elements in our spine, but Fernandinho's transfer had been in the pipeline since January 2013. I give Pellegrini credit for giving the final OK to his signing and I think signing Negredo was a stroke of genius, for which I give Pellegrini full credit. You though, Billy, must, of course, be qualified with a short statement explaining Txiki's and the Sheikh's role in the transfers. So we find that your idea that the interview shows an "it was all me" narrative is yet another example of your blind, unreasoning hatred of a central figure in our club's history.
