Roberto Mancini finds that 25 into 11 won't go for Manchester City

Posted Monday, August 16, 2010 by theguardian.com

Italian will struggle to keep all his big names happy

Roberto Mancini finds that 25 into 11 won't go for Manchester City
Manchester City manager Roberto Mancini will have to be clever to keep all the big names in his squad happy.

Around 50 minutes into this clash of aspiring cartel-busters, Roberto Mancini jumped off his seat to deliver a stern lecture to Shaun Wright-Phillips. Slapping his palms, the Manchester City manager wanted to know why his winger was unable to go through with his runs and broke into a jelly man impersonation, shaking his arms and wobbling his legs to accuse the England midfielder of timidity.

After another £100m of investment this summer, Mancini still finds himself trying to teach Wright-Phillips how not to overrun the football – how to add an outcome to his often bumbling work. A quarter of an hour later Mancini gave up and sent on Adam Johnson to replace a colleague whose presence in England's World Cup squad ahead of the former Middlesbrough player raised the first of many serious questions about Fabio Capello's judgment.

Equally baffling is how Capello failed to see that Joe Hart is comfortably the best English goalkeeper – a fact spotted by his fellow Italian Mancini, who took the bold step of demoting the excellent Shay Given to the back-up role. He was rewarded with a memorable display of Hart's agility and zest as Spurs eclipsed their wealthier fellow wannabes with a sometimes pulsating demonstration of dramatically raised self-esteem.

Mancini hopes "Shay will stay" but the former incumbent will not fancy his chances of regaining the jersey if Hart carries on this way. "He's a big man, a big goalkeeper and he respected my decision," Mancini said of Given, which hardly chimes with Given's threat to leave when he was on international duty with the Republic of Ireland.

The Hart-Given conundrum points to a much bigger brain-twister for Mancini and one that will surely determine whether City dissolve into mutiny by Christmas or the leader can somehow persuade 25 big names to subsume individual ambition for the greater good. Only the cleverest managers are able to persuade players whose names are not on the team-sheet they are indispensable to the cause. On this evidence Mancini is nowhere near knowing his best team, or even how City should play, which ought to worry the club's petro-dollar torching owners.

They started with three essentially defensive midfielders in Gareth Barry, Yaya Touré and the World Cup karate kid Nigel De Jong, behind a tiny attacking trident of Wright-Phillips, David Silva and Carlos Tevez. This flooded the midfield area, where Tottenham's midfield are so threatening, but did little to suggest City will conquer the world through enterprise.

Silva exhibited both jet-lag from his midweek trek back from national service with Spain in Mexico and the kind of deep culture shock that can make a Premier League debut by a world-class foreign signing so funny. It's the thousand-yard stare they wear after 15 minutes that is so compelling.

They enter a Kafkaesque dream in which they are sure they have woken up inside a pinball machine. Silva, who composed himself sufficiently to play a number of incisive defence-opening balls, will thrive in England, but there was less in Aleksandar Kolarov's debut at left-back to suggest he is any better than Wayne Bridge.

The process of sifting and integration is truly daunting. When all the summer money is spent, City fans can expect to see Jérôme Boateng to start in defence – probably in place of Micah Richards, who was repeatedly rebuked by Mancini for not attacking the flanks – and Mario Balotelli will be selected more often than not up front, which will require a switch to a two-striker formation, unless Tevez and Emmanuel Adebayor are happy to warm benches. Craig Bellamy and Roque Santa Cruz are officially surplus to need.

Not forgetting James Milner, whose arrival is tangled up with Stephen Ireland's demand for a golden goodbye. With all this in mind, picking the City starting XI is the impossible parlour game. Mancini is buying time faster than a futures trader. "We must remember we were missing four or five players," he said after this lively 0-0 draw. "We need three or four weeks to play together. I need to work with all the players."

In other words: search me, mate. Few Premier League heavyweights could post a definitive best XI this early but only City face such dilemmas to do with personnel, balance, shape and politics. Mancini is a biggish-name manager but lacks the authority of Sir Alex Ferguson or Arsène Wenger. His word is not yet law at Eastlands. So the great gamble by City's owners is whether Mark Hughes's successor can build a sculpture before the kind of training ground grumbles we heard last year halt his frantic carvings.

Other top four candidates without these riches will hope largesse has the opposite effect to the one intended. Proponents of evolutionary self-improvement will want to see the vast salaries paid to the likes of Yaya Touré go up in smoke, Touré, whose Barcelona lineage shines from him, looked more than a giant Claude Makélélé and could develop more along Patrick Vieira lines, but there was still an ominous suspicion that spending has taken precedence over strategy again in City's second summer under Abu Dhabi ownership.

Maybe too much money is bad for your stealth.