Maybe I'm overly sensitive to the criticism, but it seems to be the fashion among many pundits at present to deride Roberto Mancini. You'd never guess from the coverage in the British media that this is a man with a trophy winning pedigree at three major Italian clubs. Maybe it will prove in time that Mancini is more suited to coaching in Serie A than his homeland, but some of the comments about him so far from British pundits and journalists have been disgracefully disrespectful. This piece hopefully doesn't fall into that category.
I believe that Mancini received a real hospital pass when he took over here last Christmas. Having spent his entire 30-year (give or take) career in Italian football save for a month featuring four games at the end of his playing career, was brought in to take charge of a squad assembled by a manager with a diametrically opposed approach. His methods were bound to be questioned by the squad.
The fact that so many, including the players (as is well documented from well-placed sources around the club), suspected he was only minding the shop until summer made his job extremely difficult. Remember Kevin Keegan at City, whose last season was marred by the fact that everyone knew that he wouldn't be at the club beyond the following season. Even Ferguson, with all the success he'd had, couldn't continue to pick up results at anything like his normal level when he'd said he was retiring at the end of the season. The manner of Mancini's appointment completely undermined his authority from the start.
It's all very well to say he should be professional and mend fences now, but why should he? He's in a very, very high pressure job and is responsible for the results of this squad. He needs, as far as he can, to have players he can trust implicitly. I've hypothesised that he can't have the necessary degree of faith in players who've made perfectly clear that they can't stand him, so he wants them out as long as he thinks he can replace them adequately. Perfectly understandable, if so, as I said.
Not in the least do I think Mancini's perfect: I have reservations about some of his tactical thinking and his man management. But given that, when push came to shove, Mourinho preferred to go elsewhere (always eminently foreseeable, in my view), Mancini's record last season here was, to my mind, creditable - not brilliant, but very respectable in the circumstances. This coupled with a trophy winning pedigree at three Italian clubs, makes him worth a shot.
I certainly see no one else who'd realistically have been available to us this summer whom I'd regard as a better bet for the task in hand at our club. Would we be better off having enticed O'Neill to leave Villa early or lured Capello from our national team? Or should we have kept the former manager whose entire prior club managerial career consisted of having overachieved on relatively meagre resources at Blackburn? That was a worthy achievement, certainly, but ultimately a very different kind of challenge from the one offered by our job at this time.
Harping on, as many seem to, about Mancini's failure to deal with unusually testing circumstances which won't now be replicated is to my mind missing the point. As Didsbury Dave said, the slate is clean. September is when we start to judge him: he's had his bedding in period in English football, he'll have his own squad, and so there are no excuses. He's under a lot of pressure, but then he's paid to deal with that and is certainly used to it: after all, he was previously at a club where they've had 23 managers (two taking charge twice) since 1982 and only Trapattoni lasted longer in that time than Mancini. There are no excuses now.
He may not succeed, but I hope he will and I reckon he has a chance. Whatever, we'll know soon enough whether he's just a very good Italian coach not suited to management outside his homeland or whether he offers a bit more than that.
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