Nelly's Left Foot
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- 3 Mar 2009
- Messages
- 6,054
Probably back to behind the fence tomorrow.
Rammy Blue said:"Depressing day weather wise but a good session today at Carrington and not hidden away behind the fence for a pleasant change. Missing were Vieira ( Sunday not looking good at all) Lescott( very close now and has been working hard on one to one stuff) RSC ( the calf injury not as bad as it's been said) Shay but no word about him and I suspect no problems with him injury wise at all.. Bridge was back in full training today and altho a few with niggles they were still out there. ( SWP,Barry,Tevez)
Mancini deep in conversation again with Kidd when I arrived and I was joined by a young Italian ( actually from Naples but currently based in Stretford) who decided to shout across in fluent Italian to Mancini. His response was to walk over and have a brief chat and get his picture taken with him. I got a quick hello.
The session started with 2 "teams" working around the field in the way they have been recently led by either Mancini or one of the other coaches before they introduced a ball and satrted passing the ball around in the defensive formations for a while. After that they moved over to do some work outs which were really all about stretching. The Tuesday team doing one set of exercises and the rest a different more strenous work out. Mancini was chatting to Tevez quite a bit here and the relationship seems very good. All this very close to where we stood. My new Italian friend thought it was great to be so close and was amazed there were so few watching as at Napoli he might have expected a crowd.
He talked about the Italian way of playing and how 0.0 or 1.0 were so often seen as good results but he feels that at City the defence isn't good enough for Mancini to play like this.He was though very complimentary about NDJ but not so about one or two others.
They then started a game on just less than half a pitch which was quite frenetic and with litle space or time demanded a really good first touch and excellent awareness. Needless to say NDJ thrived on this but the likes of Robinho ,Petrov and Tevez struggled to make any impact. It was a close run competitive game which NDJ's team won 6.5 with two late goals from Barry to seal it. Bellamy got one or 2 as did Benjani and there was a cracker from Ireland who latched onto a misplaced pass. Competitive but no injuries from what I could see despite Stevie limping out of one little crunch tackle.
At the end of this game a few disappeared but Mancini took 11 away onto another pitch to do a little attacking work with them whilst Bellers and Robinho did some shooting practice. I just got the feeling that Robi just needs something good to happen and it will all come flooding back. During this shooting practice a ball flew over and after afew words in Italian Mr Napoli was allowed to keep the ball!
I am off to get some Italian lessons."