Does Mark Hughes have a point?

“Carlos (Tevez) is strong-willed, certainly,” he said. “Yes, he wants to play and for a guy who has come through life the hard way he still has a genuine desire to want to play every week. I never saw him as volatile. I can’t think of one incident where there were flashpoints, but I played a long time and I can handle things like that. You learn how to take the sting out of it. It would never have happened under my watch.”

Yep, suddenly Hughes is the master man-manager. Funny how he doesn’t mention failing to handle Robinho, the biggest name at the club for much of the time, or his total failure to work with Elano, once making him wait outside his office for an hour like a naughty schoolboy. The reason he had little problem with Tevez was that it was the player’s first season at City – and he tends to behave in his debut season.

Just how would he have avoided flashpoints? Well as mentioned earlier, by indulging the player. Well City tried that, and Tevez took advantage even more. It’s a dangerous game to bow down to the whims of any player, and it tends not to go down too well with other players. Fancy that.

The best though was left to last.

“Whether or not the group as a whole work as diligently and with the same mantra Manchester United have, I’d maybe suggest not. Every Manchester United player understands what United is about. The players understand it is a privilege to play for them. They show the club that deference. I’m not sure the group at City understand that yet.”

City fans are used to this oft-repeated rubbish that United players all play for the shirt, would play for free if necessary, and that City are just a bunch of over-paid mercenaries after the money at a club ridden with ill-discipline, and poor team morale. Well apart from the fact that if they were just playing for money it would be fine (it is their job after all), the evidence seems to suggest otherwise does it not? And if you are going to come out with such steaming piles of dog-poo, best not to do it the day before City beat United 6-1 at Old Trafford – it just makes you look even more stupid, and even more bitter.

By Sunday he had enraged Mohammed Al Fayed, and when the man that erects a statue of Michael Jackson outside his ground calls you strange, then you know you’re in trouble.

“What a strange man Mark Hughes is,” he said. “Sacked by Manchester City, he was becoming a forgotten man when I rescued him to become manager of Fulham Football Club.”

“Even when results were bad, I did not put pressure on him. I gave him every support – financial, moral and personal. He fully negotiated a two-year extension to his contract. On the day he was due to sign, he walked out without the courtesy of a proper explanation. And now he insults the club, saying it lacks ambition, and the players who delivered an eighth position finish last season and a place in the Europa League.”

In my opinion, he is an average manager who would be out of his depth at a top job. He surrounded himself at City with his friends (The Welsh maffia, or as many called them – The Taffia”), bought Jo and Santa Cruz for £35m, and lacked the imagination to take the club to a higher level. Rather than taking agent-led snide digs at a man he doesn’t know, a man with a managerial record far to superior to his, perhaps he should concentrate on working out why he is out of work, and try to work on his own deficiencies. And when even journalists on Twitter are saying you sound bitter and twisted, then perhaps the problems lie closer to home.

Written by Howard Hockin for FootballFanCast.com

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