Before Roberto Mancini took over Manchester City, you had to go back 34 years and 22 managers to find our last success, that 1976 League Cup win over Newcastle United.
The self-proclaimed “best manager in England” has won a club desperate for a trophy three in the last 15 months alone – a Premier League title, an FA Cup and a Community Shield. His club currently sits second in the premiership and is in the quarter finals of the FA Cup. He is absolutely correct to say “there is not another manager that’s won like me in the last 15 months” and even more justified to get angry when most of the questions at his press conferences are about him losing his job.
Yes, our Champions League record is a contributing factor to the line of questioning. With nearly £300million spent on players since his arrival it is natural to expect the team to be more competitive in the competition. But those calling for Mancini’s head – including renowned football ‘expert’ Danny Mills – are quite simply being ridiculous.
Any seasoned City fan will tell you – along with any seasoned football fan – that where management is concerned, consistency is the key. Those of us unfortunate enough to remember the 1996/97 season will recall the disastrous spell where we had FIVE different managers before January alone. In my opinion it was this managerial inconsistency that led to our relegation to the third tier of English football. At that same time, Mancini was winning the UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup and UEFA Super Cup as a player for Lazio.
Since then, Joe Royle, Kevin Keegan, our first ever foreign manager Sven Goran Eriksson, Stuart Pearce, and of course Mark Hughes, all worked hard – without significant financial backing – to turn us back into a top 10 side in the top flight.
We are all fully aware of the importance of having faith in our manager. Not twenty minutes go by in a City game these days without the fans chanting Mancini’s name. We want him to stay, compete for more honours, and at the very least complete the contract he signed in July that keeps him with us until 2017, when he’ll still be only 52.
But for all the support he has from fans, I fear that the club is a little quieter than it should be. We have a chairman, chief executive officer and a new sporting director in former Barcelona technical director Txiki Begiristain, all of whom Mancini has stated “work for the same thing and [we all] have our positions.”
Mancini has echoed the voices of fans in recent press conferences, insisting that “club stability is important” and that it is “impossible to build a team like United [and] Barca. It takes seven, eight years.” Perhaps this was meant just as much for the club’s upper hierarchy as it was for the badgering press.
However, the dreaded ‘vote of confidence’ should probably have already been given by now – but then the media would make a big deal of that too – so perhaps those upstairs have decided to be neither seen nor heard and leave the footballing matters to a decorated young manager they sought fit to put their faith into with a new contract.
Here’s hoping…
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