Thanks, George. I don't mind if supporters want to fondly remember Mancini. But it is important to remember that he was sacked for a reason, and those reasons weren't arbitrary nor unfair.
We weren't just happily sailing along and suddenly Saint Roberto found himself out of favour with the capricious sheikh and got sacked. Granted Marwood and our executive team spectacularly fucked that last transfer window, which shouldn't be forgotten. However, just as Mancini didn't get RVP and DDR, Pellegrini didn't get Cavani, Pepe or Isco, yet found alternatives that became key members of the squad. One article described Mancini at a transfer meeting after he had lost his primary targets, he sat unresponsive and wouldn't communicate with the DOF/transfer committee about alternatives, so Marwood started buying players when left to himself. Mancini after all did not believe that a DOF should have authority over him. That's the reason we got Sinclair, and it fits logically with what we saw: Sinclair was purchased but never given a chance. Mancini obviously didn't rate him as Sinclair never saw the pitch, so clearly he was bought without Mancini's input.
You can't know for certain whether the accounts of what happened behind the scenes are true down to every detail, but you can match up the hundreds of leaks with what happened on the pitch and in the transfer market, and come to some reasonable level of certainty that it must roughly describe what happened.
Or we can dismiss it all as media bollocks. But then we'd have to believe that Mancini was sacked for no reason, and that the problems we were seeing on the pitch also happened for no reason attributable to Mancini, and the bust ups in public were just all isolated incidents or the faults of the players, and the cup final was just an anomaly caused by our shit players (defending champions btw)...
