I quite liked Nasri and I tend to think the accusations of being a mercenary or lazy are more about assumptions of his character than anything that happened on the pitch.
There’s nothing in this interview which contradicts what’s already been aired about Mancini’s time at City. Wearing a scarf and ‘tearing the banner down’ just struck me as good PR, but the other side of the coin was an ongoing sense of drama and instability which did nothing for performances on the pitch. With the squad we had we should have won the league by far more than goal difference in 2012 and it was Mancini’s intransigence which resulted in Van Persie going to the rags which pretty much cost us the league the following seasons. Tevez being unavailable for much of the 11/12 season because Mancini invented a fictional version of events in Munich was ia sackable offence.
Mancini’s biggest flaw was that he thought he was bigger than the club and could play political games, negotiate with alternative employers, dictate transfer strategy, demand signings on a plate and drive players out of the door without any of it coming back to him. Without getting in to national stereotypes, perhaps he did think City would cheat there way through FFP so he could have five centre forwards, Hazard, AND De Rossi without having to sell anyone despite it being obvious to all and sundry that this was not going to happen.
Prior to joining City Mancini’s record in club management was good but not great and the same could be said for his post City club career. Managing City was the peak of his career but he never realised what he had and let it slip away. Ironically, perhaps the same could be said about Nasri?
As an aside, it's been said that Mancini didn’t do much in the way of team talks and it was usually Kompany who got things organised in the dressing room. One of Mancini’s main weaknesses was that he was quite tactically limited which was very apparent in Europe and on any occasion we played a side using 3,5,2 – the FA Cup final being a prime example.
What I struggle to understand is the masturbatory reverence in which Mancini is still held by people who treat Pellegrini with equal levels of disdain. They won similar amounts but the main difference is that Pellegrini did so under the constraints of FFP and with much better performances in the Champions League.
Mancini did get some big things right - facing down the egos in the squad, putting the pressure back on the rags in 11/12 title race and also taking the heat for the 3-0 defeat at Anfield the Monday before the FA Cup semi-final. However, overall, only achieved the minimum of what he should and by the end of 12/13 had, arguably, set us back.
