Roberto Mancini Is Shown The Door

When Sir Alex Ferguson announced his retirement last week he must have thought that his days of seeing off rival managers had to an end, but apparently not.

Last night exactly one year to the day from helping Manchester City win the Premier League title Roberto Mancini has been sacked. In all honesty I don’t think the decision has come as a shock to anyone in football but City could have handled the situation a hell of a lot better. After all the news that Mancini would be on his way leaked on the Saturday morning just before the cup final, so everyone was aware it was only a matter of time. And this makes it frankly laughable that the club in their statement last night referred to taking action now ‘Out of respect for Roberto.’

On the face of it, it seems that Mancini may be a little bit hard done by. I mean this season they are going to finish 2^nd in the league and are runners up in the F.A Cup but there is far more to this than meets the eye. To start with the club have underperformed in Europe. Last season they failed in the Champions League and the Eurpoa League, and this season they again failed to get out of their Champions League group. Yes their group included a finalist and semi-finalist but they finished bottom of the group behind Ajax, and you have to say that they really should have finished above the Dutch champions.

I think however the biggest issue that has forced this decision is the relationships that Mancini had within in the club, or more accurately the lack of them. His relationship with those above him has been a little spiky at times and it has been reported now that he has left the club that he didn’t really make an effort to communicate and work with the board. He has also struggled with relationships with his players, with at least from the outside his man management skills looking to be non-existent. This season he publicly criticised Joe Hart and Samir Nasri to name just two. This is on top of complaining about the signings the club made over summer saying on numerous occasions that they were not the players that he wanted and that basically he didn’t think they were up to scratch. When looking at all of these things in black and white it’s not hard to see why squad harmony has been a problem. It’s got so bad that while I have been writing this post even the kit man has had a go! He took to Twitter to call the Italian ‘Arrogant and self-centred’ amongst other things.

It also can’t be ignored that for large parts of the season the team really haven’t played that well. They have been short of any form of urgency and spark that they showed last season and that you need to challenge for major honours. The best example came in the cup final just a few days ago, there was no energy and no imagination and frankly after 10 minutes no way that they were going to win the game. So, what next?

The club have announced that Brian Kidd will be in charge of 1^st team affairs for the last 2 games of the season while they look to appoint a new manager. The preferred candidate and bookies favourite is Manuel Pellegrini, who for my money would be a very good choice. There have also been whispers that should they not get Pellegrini, Rafa Benitez would be someone they could look at. And if Rafa does rock up at City it will just be a shame they Sir Alex has retired otherwise we could have seen so serious fireworks.

And as for Mancini he might think he has been a little hard done by but I wouldn’t shed too many tears for him he’s off to Monaco by the looks of it… What a nightmare ay?