Excellent Article with MH
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MARK HUGHES TALKS TO MARTIN SAMUEL: Manchester City's manager on trying to sign Kaka, being City boss and just what the club needs
EXCLUSIVE by MARTIN SAMUEL
Last updated at 9:37 PM on 23rd January 2009
What some would now term the acceptable face of Manchester City is peering out from beneath grey hair and making a passionate case to be given a job. Unfortunately, such is the madness of modern football, the post he would appear to be applying for is the one he currently occupies.
‘I am exactly what this club needs at this time,’ Mark Hughes says, the words spilling fast from a man with a fair deal to get off his chest.
‘A lot of people wouldn’t fancy this job, because it is hard. It has been more difficult than I thought because you have got to drive a club from the bottom to the top. It is far easier to arrive in a few years’ time, maybe, when they are on the brink of getting there.
Mark Hughes
‘You know, some managers are fire fighters, some are developers and some take a successful club and continue its success. I develop: the team and the club. I get involved at all levels, in the details, in what is acceptable and what is not. And everywhere I have been my way has worked.
'Mediocrity has surrounded Manchester City for too long and if we don’t get these foundations in now, the project is built on sand and it will not be sustainable.’
Hughes is not one for picking fights, so no names are mentioned. Even so, when he talks of managers who pitch up for the final stage of the mission, or who maintain an established winning formula, one particular coach comes to mind: the Portuguese gentleman who has been consistently connected to the Manchester City post almost from the day Sheik Mansour walked in, with Robinho neatly parcelled.
Since then, Hughes has been undermined in several quarters. Either he is a patsy, no more than a marginalised observer of transfer proceedings at his club, or he is in charge, and therefore the reason Manchester City cannot attract, or control, the biggest names in football. Were a manager such as Jose Mourinho there, we are informed, it would all be different.
Hughes does not wish to go on the defensive again but cannot help it. To believe the criticism, a man who played for Manchester United, Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Chelsea supposedly has no idea of what makes good players tick.
A manager with European, international and Premier League experience, who defeated Italy in a competitive game while in charge of Wales and beat Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal in his second season at Blackburn Rovers, is not up to team-building at Manchester City.
'We aspire to be a top club by working like a top club and if people cannot cope with that, they will fall by the wayside'
‘I don’t buy that I am not big enough to manage the best players,’ Hughes insists.
‘It is not as if I am green behind the gills. I have been a manager for 10 years, I have been in the Premier League for five years. To have people questioning my ability is annoying because I know my ability, I know the ability of my staff, too, and the way we work is second to none. What should never be levelled at us is that we don’t know what we are doing or that we don’t know in what direction we want the club to go.
‘It frustrates me, this perception that there are only a handful of guys in the world who can take a training session.
'It feels like I’m attempting a hard sell here, but I’ll wager Manchester City has the best qualified coaching staff in the country. And a badge isn’t everything, but I have watched some of the greatest coaches and, believe me, they are doing little that is different. They are all sponges, they are all thieves, they absorb what they have seen others do and then take it in their own direction.
' I know the players at Manchester City get the same treatment they would get at the biggest clubs in Europe. That is my way.
Too much too young: Hughes in his Barcelona days but he didn't like the way the club looked after him during his time there
‘Any player taking a step up to join Manchester City will notice the difference, and any player who has come from an elite club will not see the join. Roque Santa Cruz came to Blackburn Rovers from Bayern Munich, which was the most professional club I ever played for, and he had no problem with how we worked on a daily basis.
‘I played at this level and higher. I know all of the little things that go into making a player happy. Munich taught me that. They were a million miles ahead of anything I had seen in terms of preparation. They understood what affected players.
'At Barcelona we were left to get on with it and, for me, at a young age, that was too much too soon. I didn’t want to leave Manchester United. I had no language, I had no car, I had a house with a fantastic fireplace, but I needed logs and I didn’t know how to get logs. I’d see these logs piled up outside people’s houses but I had no idea how to ask where they came from. I got so desperate I was walking around thinking about nicking some. It took me three months to even work out how to get a car.
'On day one at Munich, home, car, all of it was sorted. I’ve never forgotten that.’
Hughes was speaking at the club’s temporary winter base in Tenerife — ‘nice little mid-season jaunt, bit of warm weather, it seemed simple when we organised it’ — where bulletins have veered between extremes that seem to sum up City’s plight.
On Monday, news that the star player, Robinho, had done a bunk to Brazil was shortly followed by an announcement that the Kaka deal had collapsed with rancorous fall-out.
Nigel de Jong joined City this week
On Thursday morning, however, Hughes took his first training session with new signings Nigel de Jong and Craig Bellamy and noticed an instant improvement. Right now, it very much is a tale of two Citys for Hughes: the best of times and the worst of times often encapsulated in one afternoon.
In five days’ time, the merit of his new signings will be given an instant approval rating, based on the result against Newcastle United; meanwhile, the additional signings of Santa Cruz, the Blackburn striker, and Shay Given, the Newcastle goalkeeper, have not been ruled out.
When the opportunity to bring in one of the top players in the world comes along, you cannot fail to pursue it out of fear that it has come too soon'
Blink and you will miss the latest episode of Eastlanders. Yet it is the idea of City aiming for the stars with Kaka and Robinho only to knock off their chimney-stack and set fire to the roof that has dominated the news agendas, and it remains an issue Hughes must address.
‘So we tried to buy Kaka?’ he asks. ‘I couldn’t see a downside, because I didn’t realise how badly we were going to get hammered if we failed to bring it off.
The one that got away: Hughes was unable to persuade Kaka to move to Manchester City but feels the club were right to chase the former world player of the year
'Yet what were we meant to do? When the opportunity to bring in one of the top players in the world comes along, you cannot fail to pursue it out of fear that it has come too soon. It might not happen again and you will always be wondering, what if? So, no, it would not put me off trying again.
‘We were right to do it and we got closer than people expected. Yes, we were running before we could walk, but we were trying to make something happen here.
'We went from 15th to sixth at Blackburn Rovers because key acquisitions drove us forward and with a fair wind we could repeat that.
‘There is this attitude — oh, what do you expect, this is City — and that is what we have to change. There has been an acceptance of a mid-table mindset and at least we have ripped that up. Why shouldn’t we aspire to something better? At the moment, we are the crisis club. But we look at what is going on elsewhere and think: when is it going to be Tottenham Hotspur’s turn? I watched that game with Burnley the other night. Cheering every f****** goal, I was.
‘I know what people think about the figure of £100million for one player, but it was for a five-year contract. Some clubs spend £20m each year on players that are nowhere near as good as Kaka. We were spending that each year for five years, but each year we were to get Kaka. I felt comfortable with that.
‘I went to the first meeting we had about it in Germany two or three months ago. I spoke with Kaka’s father, always very positive. There are lessons to be learned from this.
'I will deal with Robinho in such a way that I absolutely, would not expect this to happen again'
'A lot of people at this club are new to the football business and maybe we need greater knowledge of what makes deals happen. I never had the opportunity to sit with Kaka, so I don’t know if that would have made a difference, but I wasn’t intimidated by the thought of managing him.
‘I have always felt that top players are easier to control because they have a professional mentality and a winning mentality and that is why they are at the top. Now it seems a bit bizarre to be talking like this considering what has happened with Robinho, but it will be addressed, mainly because I expect certain standards from my best guys.
No problems: Hughes will deal with Robinho's absence from Tenerife and insists there are no problems between the pair
'I will deal with Robinho in such a way that I absolutely would not expect this to happen again and I feel confident that if there was a longer problem with any player, even Robinho, I would have the go-ahead from Sheik Mansour to deal with it in whatever way I saw fit.
‘People talk about assurances to Robinho, but any reassurance would just be repetition. He knows how I feel. I have no problem with good footballers. The ones that are a problem are those that have a higher opinion of their ability than is apparent and a higher opinion of their worth to the team.’
Hughes has a few of them, too, no doubt and the summer will be spent not just achieving the next level of team-building — he believes it will take another four or five transfer windows to get his squad right — but separating the wheat from the chaff in the current group.
‘We will make the standard consistent and the work ethic intense,’ he promises. ‘Some will find it hard and they will need to go somewhere else, but that is natural wastage. We aspire to be a top club by working like a top club and if people cannot cope with that, they will fall by the wayside.
'Manchester City used to be all about winning the odd big game, then having a rest until the next big game. They might beat Liverpool, but there was no consistency. Now we can’t do that. We can’t hide. We have to win every match because there is now a level of expectation and some players will find that difficult.
'I want to give good players the opportunity to be the best they can be. I want to make them successful. If that is too much hard work for them, if they have not got the mental strength, they are not going to come on this journey.’
The irony is that most of the pressure on Hughes is external. He suspects the source of mischievous speculation about his future and it is not Sheik Mansour or his entourage in Abu Dhabi. An owner willing to make a £100m acquisition for his manager can hardly be accused of a lack of support, and even if that move did not come off, City could still end up spending close to £50m in the transfer window, which is hardly disobliging.
Hughes’s biggest battle would appear to be with the general perception that it is only a matter of time before he makes way for a marquee name. When he travelled east to meet the Sheik last year he returned with a private vote of confidence.
‘He could not have been more supportive,’ Hughes adds. ‘The problem is that from the start the agenda has been set by the initial publicity around the takeover when one man, Sulaiman al-Fahim, who is no longer involved, was talking about signing Cristiano Ronaldo and Fernando Torres. That set the tone and we are still trying to repair the damage. Kaka got roped in with that perception of us, when it was not the same issue at all.
'Look, if there is an opportunity to take world-class players then we have to try. I don’t see a big problem with that. It is not being done over my head and this is not a Real Madrid situation with galacticos.
‘I want the strongest possible team, yes, but we are going to build it. That was my remit on day one and it remains. Football decisions are my decisions. And feel free to spread that around because no f***** ever believes me.’