 Friday, 4th Nov 2011 11:01 by Clive Whittingham For years now QPR fans who loathe Chelsea and balk at the idea of supporting Man Utd instead have prayed for a third way. Now that alternative is here, but does Man City’s grotesque financial outlay sour the pill somewhat? OverviewManchester City are, to most QPR fans, an absolute dream come true. You see since Roman Abramovic jumped off the District Line down at Fulham Broadway and started ploughing his oily rubles into our favourite racists at Stamford Bridge life as a QPR fan has been rather difficult. Suddenly Chelsea have started winning things, and Chelsea shirts have started popping up where there were no Chelsea shirts before – in the Aberdeen Angus Steak House opposite Paddington train station while Chelsea are playing on a televised fixture available to watch in the pub next door for instance. People suddenly claiming to be lifelong Chelsea fans, but strangely unaware of the existence of Robert Fleck, have started to appear in our workplaces and on our tube trains keen to enforce their historical knowledge of the club by talking about how they used to go to “The Bridge” when Ruud Gullit played all those years ago. More to the point, they want to take the piss about how shit everybody else is compared to them and moan like hell about Norwegian referees and slippery Russian penalty spots when things don’t go quite their way. They persistently mistake us, and everybody else, for people who give a flying toss about John ‘captain, leader, legend, racist’ Terry and big fat Frankie Lampard. Surely there must be an alternative? Well yes, but sadly it’s that red lot in Manchester - Ferguson and his bloody stopwatch, red Neville and his facial hair, Christiano Ronaldo and his winking and his diving and his seemingly always erect and active cock. Yeh, that lot that QPR beat fair and square in 1996 just at the point when we really, really, really needed to beat somebody to preserve our Premiership status only for retiring referee and alleged Manchester United fan Robbie Hart to continue playing until the second reading of the classified football results only to blow the final whistle the very second Eric Cantona headed the inevitable equaliser. QPR were relegated and have only just made it back this season, 15 years later – how any QPR fan can ever wish anything other than fire and pestilence on Manchester U-fucking-nited is beyond me. What we’ve needed for sometime is a third way. Step forward Sheik Mansour and Manchester City. He’s a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family, has previously been heavily involved in the world of horse racing, and has an estimated personal wealth of £20bn. He has spent an estimated £433m on transfer fees, built up an annual wage bill of £360m, and as it stands has committed just shy of £1m to the club for every day he’s been in charge since 2008. While he’s been doing that Manchester United allowed themselves to be taken over by the Glazer family, who borrowed more than £500m to complete the purchase and then loaded that debt straight onto the club. Sometimes life can be just that good can’t it? The problem is, the English don’t very much care for this City way of going about things. It’s just not cricket to roll up, blow the competition out of the water with money and win everything in sight. This is the third time it’s happened since the dawn of the Premiership – Blackburn first and then Chelsea have won the league for the pure and simple reason that their owners were richer than everybody else, and Manchester City will now surely do the same, possibly as soon as this season. The signs were good for them from the moment the fixtures were released this season – QPR are the final visitors to Eastlands in May and as all Wolves, Newcastle, West Brom, Crewe and Preston fans know a late season fixture with QPR usually means points, promotion parties and pitch invasions. Really it’s only the fact that, when pushed, 75% of the people in Britain today would rather eat broken glass for dinner than profess any sort of liking or support for Man Utd or Chelsea that means Man City aren’t hated as well. Perhaps that will come as the Korean tourists pack out Eastlands and replica tops start appearing in Torbay and the Paddington branch of Aberdeen Angus. Until then, most right thinking individuals probably did themselves a mischief laughing so hard at their recent 6-1 victory at Old Trafford. This season there has been much talk about Carlos Tevez who, yet again, is angling for a move to a new club but has found his ludicrous pay packet and transfer fee pricing him out of every single market in the world game. The combination of him, his loathsome adviser Kia Joorabchian and Man City and their open cheque book could easily be seen to encapsulate everything that is wrong with the modern game. But it’s impossible not to admire a team that includes David Silva, a manager who has dealt with his various problem children with the firmness and class of Roberto Mancini and a club that, whatever it’s done or will go on to do, is not Manchester United or Chelsea. Interview
So, Man City, you're going to win the league this year aren't you? At the start of the season I wrote that City should be challenging for the title but I didn’t feel as though I could tip them to win it as they didn’t have the history of challenging for, and sustaining a title challenge throughout the season. Although the summer additions meant the squad was comparable (if not better) than any throughout the league, the experience of United and Chelsea gave them the edge I thought. Now, City’s start has been superb and if they hadn’t suffered the blip in the second half at Fulham they would have won all ten games. Yes, their fixtures have been amongst the easiest in the league to date but the manner of the victories has been so impressive and they have answered every question posed of them. So far, so good and at this point (with the lead they have opened up) they are deserved favourites. Having sunk so low is this current situation really, really sweet for you or is it sort of tainted because it's been artificially bought? If you took a poll of City fans I doubt you would get even 1% who would feel that the recent success is in any way tainted. In some ways you’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t as to even put yourself position to challenge the established order takes such vast resources that it is virtually unobtainable. Take QPR, who have grand designs of their own and did fantastically well in achieving promotion but in even having spent a fair amount in the summer are light years away from being close to the top four. If you look back over the past twenty years or so there isn’t a side who has achieved any sort of success in the league without buying it; what has changed is the amount it takes to achieve that success has increased substantially. Usually at this stage I ask what people's hopes and ambitions are for this season and the medium to long term but I suspect City's are pretty obvious aren't they? Having ended the trophy drought last season the club got rid of the monkey from its back but in doing so, expectations were raised as a result. The side has to challenge for the league starting from this season and whilst there may be a degree of inevitability around it you would expect the side to win the league over the next couple of seasons and to then establish themselves as perennial challengers. What has been interesting this season is the performance in the Champions League. Handed a tough group the side has struggled at the half way point (written before Wednesday’s Villarreal game) and it may well take a little longer for them to build the necessary experience to challenge in Europe. Is Roberto Mancini the right man for the job? What have you made of him as a manager so far? I don’t think Mancini’s stock has ever been higher than at the moment. At the time of his appointment there was still a degree of sympathy for Mark Hughes (mainly over the manner of his dismissal) and even last season he hadn’t quite won all fans over with the perceived negative tactics. What has helped him this season is the continual issue of Carlos Tevez – in particular the incident in Munich which really put everyone firmly behind Mancini. What he has shown is an adeptness in terms of his tactics and being able to rotate the side. He also has a good ability with regards to making in-game adjustments. The one concern would be his record with Inter in the Champions League which was not overly impressive but it is still early days for him at City. Do you think the 6-1 at Old Trafford might have changed Alex Ferguson's mind about you guys being nothing more than 'noisy neighbours' and Liverpool being Man Utd's 'true derby'? It was hilarious wasn't it?! I don’t believe for a second that he still believed City were merely a minor irritant before that game as he will have known full well the threat City now pose. Although City have progressed the past couple of seasons, United have generally had the upper hand until the FA Cup semi-final and because City haven’t really challenged United for the league there was still that distance between the two sides. It may be early days in the season that looks to have gone and they are on as level a footing as I have seen in my lifetime and this only serves to increase the importance of the derby. What's the general feeling around the forthcoming Fifa Financial Fair Play rules and how they will affect City? Because they haven’t been implemented and really tested there hasn’t been a huge amount of concern about them I don’t think. I think the feeling is that the club will comply and from what we have heard they have been working with UEFA (in particular with the recent sponsorship deal) to ensure they do comply. What we need to see – and not just with City – is some real evidence that a club is struggling to meet the requirements to fully understand the implications of the regulations. What is the general feeling around Carlos Tevez? The fans always seemed very forgiving of him last season despite his repeated transfer requests. The overriding feeling is one of ambivalence I’d say. As I mentioned earlier, the incident in Munich has clearly strengthened Mancini’s hand and if it was an attempt at a calculated move from Tevez it has backfired badly. It’s true that last season he was forgiven but the transfer request saga was a strange one and the likely outcome always seemed as if it would be a retraction from Tevez. What did help his cause last season was despite being a malcontent off the pitch, his commitment on the pitch could not be questioned and he turned in yet another superb season. The emergence of Balotelli and Dzeko after a season of adjustment, plus the signing of Aguero has meant the reliance on Tevez has been diminished and I’d suspect this is where much of his angst stems from. We all know about the likes of Aguero, but who are the unsung heroes in the City team? With the way City have started it is difficult to really say any players are under the radar right now. Two players I would pick out though who are by no means headline grabbers are Gareth Barry and James Milner. Barry, derided as much by sections of City fans as he is by England fans, is one of those players you appreciate far more when you see them live as opposed to TV – where you can get a true reflection of his influence in the midfield. Milner struggled to find a regular place last season and was often shunted out wide but this season has played in a more central role and has shown the drive and dynamism that he displayed during that successful season at Villa that earned him the move to City. Your academy has performed well in youth competitions in recent years - is there still a chance for young players to progress into the first team at City? Who are the bright young things coming through at the moment? Of course there will be the opportunity and Mancini has shown that he is willing to give opportunities to the Academy players. The difficulty is that the bar to break through has been raised tremendously, but this is no different than at United or Chelsea for instance. A number of players have moved out on loan to Championship clubs for either the whole or part of the season. From what I have seen so far, midfielders Abdul Razak (currently on loan at Portsmouth) and Denis Suarez (a seventeen year old signed from Celta Vigo) and 16 year-old Dutch defender Karim Rekik look to be the pick. Thanks to Danny for his help this week. If you’re interested he’s got a book out (publisher’s offers for the LoftforWords annual continue to be thin on the ground), Man City 365 which can be bought on Amazon or in other places that sell books. ManagerRoberto Mancini the player was part of a Sampdoria team that made you glad to be alive so you could watch them. Until recently he was the manager of a Manchester City team so dull and negative suicide seemed a more favourable option than settling down in front of one of their away matches. In the Premiership last year a fixture at an Arsenal side in fast decline featured one of the most negative and miserable visiting team set ups ever seen at the Emirates Stadium. 'Parking the bus' is the modern parlance, and Arsenal have certainly seen a few Blackburn Rovers and Bolton Wanderers teams come and try to do it in recent times, but City were so unashamedly miserable about it that 'bricking the goal up' may have been a more accurate metaphor. "Boring, boring City" was the chorus at full time – of course those clad in Sky Blue chant that ironically these days now Mancini has let his team of stars off the leash. Watching them destroy Manchester United a fortnight ago, you'd scarcely believe it was the same team from that dire 0-0 draw in North London. Mancini may be Italian, and therefore carry the national football stereotype forged over more than a century of battling to 1-0 wins, but he never seemed like ideal management material as a player, and certainly not an overtly negative one. English football fans saw him only very briefly on these shores, four scoreless games at Leicester City at the end of his career, but he was widely recognised as one of the finest footballers of the 1980s and 90s. He graduated from youth football at Bologna but found himself thrust into a team about to be relegated two years in a row. The entire team scored 25 goals between them in 1981/82 on their way out of Serie A, Mancini scored nine of them and played every match as a 17-year old. Needless to say he did not journey to Serie B with his hapless team mates. He'd done enough to earn a move to Sampdoria, who passed Bologna coming the other way, and it was there in Genoa that he spearheaded the club's greatest ever side alongside Gianluca Vialli. His goal scoring record, at a time when Serie A was recognised as the best league in the world and famed for the water tight defences of its top teams, was extraordinary. He bagged 132 goals in 424 games. In 1991 Sampdoria won the Serie A title ahead of the big names from Milan, Turin and Rome backed by the millions of oil rich tycoon Paolo Mantovani – it was the club's first, and as yet only, league title. Considering that Inter attacked that season with West German World Cup winners Lothar Matthaus and Jurgen Klinsmann at their disposal and even Napoli had Diego Maradona the achievement was formidable. They reached the Champions League final a year later but lost to Barcelona , they won the Cup Winners Cup in 1990 having won the Italian cup four times in nine years and they were bloody good to watch. How could a side with Mancini and Vialli up front be anything else? Mancini was no angel, hence the doubts about his managerial potential. Sampdoria chucked some of Mantovani's money at Trevor Francis in the 1980s after he'd won the European Cup with Nottingham Forest but the soon to be QPR manager's seniority and medal collection didn't stop a young Mancini starting a training ground fight with him that required team mates to wade in. In 1995 he received a six match ban for his reaction to a referee who had refused to award Sampdoria a penalty – Mancini threw his captain's armband at the official and stormed off the field refusing to play. He returned briefly at the behest of manager Sven Goran Eriksson but a wild lunge on Paul Ince soon saw him returning to the dressing room at the referee's request. Nevertheless Eriksson took him to Lazio in 2000 and the pair won another Serie A title together. Despite this chequered disciplinary history, which perhaps explains his continued patience with wild child Mario Balotelli, Mancini has indeed made a very fine manager. At cash strapped (and soon to be bankrupt) Fiorentina he won the Italian Cup and then did likewise with Lazio. The achievements did not go unnoticed at Inter Milan where owner Massimo Moretti had been throwing millions at the likes of Ronaldo since 1995 and achieved one solitary UEFA Cup success in a decade when Mancini became the latest in a string of managers to try his hand at the San Siro. In his first season in charge they won Serie A thanks to Juventus being stripped of the crown in a match fixing scandal – but Inter were worthy default champions having only lost two games all season. Three other league titles followed, two Italian Cups and three Italian Super Cups. Then they sacked him – well, this is Italy we're talking about. Last year City could be dire to watch, but they ended their 35 year wait for a trophy with an FA Cup win continuing Mancini's awesome record in knock out competitions. Personally I groaned when they made the Champions League ahead of Spurs, expecting a series of dreadful "a draw is always a good result" bore fests. That may yet come, but City have already scored 51 goals in 17 matches this season, including six against reigning champions Manchester United. It seems that the insomnia curing performances they turned in on occasions last season were just while Mancini got his defence in place – he's now hung some of the world's finest trinkets from that tree and while the criticism will always be that success at Inter and City is more about money than managers his record both as a boss and a player speaks for itself. Scout ReportYou sort of got the feeling it was going to be QPR's day against Chelsea when Didier Drogba senselessly got himself sent off before half time to reduce them to nine men. If Rangers are to pull off an even more unlikely result against the big spending league leaders this weekend then perhaps the moment that our chance presented itself came before the game even kicked off. Ask QPR fans to pick a Man City player not to play this weekend and I dare say the top answer would be Sergio Aguero. But you only have to watch this supremely talented side to know that the likes of Aguero can only perform as they do because of the wonderfully creative force of David Silva behind them. Silva, a former star at Valencia and Spanish international, glides around the field between the midfield and the attack – rarely giving the ball away, frequently producing the killer pass for a goal. In the Champions League in the week Villarreal, missing eight regular first teamers through injury, recognised Silva as the linchpin but could do little about it. They surrounded him in possession, often with three players, and tried to force his passes backwards rather than into dangerous areas. I'd anticipate QPR trying something similar having enjoyed second half success against Luka Modric at Spurs last week by bringing Joey Barton into the centre of midfield and moving him and Alejandro Faurlin further forward to confront the problem higher up the field. That's if Silva plays. Seeing the little man leave the field holding his back just under three days before our Saturday night meeting must render him doubtful for this match – that could be the moment things swung QPR's way. If it does then we should probably cut our old mate Stuart Attwell a bit of slack as well. It was the young Warwickshire official, as popular as a porcupine in a condom factory at Loftus Road after his abysmal handling of a Championship match with Birmingham in 2009, who sent off defender Vincent Kompany against Wolves last week, suspending him for this match in the process. City had been struggling for clean sheets of late despite their awesome form, the shut out in Spain on Wednesday was their first in six attempts, but that's to take nothing away from Kompany who was named City's Player of the Year last season ahead of Carlos Tevez and all the other stars at Mancini's disposal. His absence leaves a hole the size of his enormous head at the heart of the visiting defence this weekend and while nobody in the City team is ever replaced by a poor player when they drop out, they are undoubtedly weakened by his absence. Man City's system isn't a million miles away from the one favoured by Neil Warnock – although there the similarities end you could say. They play with a leading striker, either Edin Dzeko who started the season looking like a world beater with seven goals in his first three games then regressed to his poor form of last season but now has seven goals in six games again for club and country, or Mario Balotelli who is finally starting to show off his ability as a footballer as well as the class clown. Their styles are very different, Dzeko a hulking centre forward in the traditional target man guise, Balotelli much more skilful and desperate for the ball into feet. QPR don't know which one is going to start, and will therefore not know what style of striker they'll be facing until about 4pm on Saturday night. Like Rangers they then play with three supplementary attackers – usually Silva is a mainstay and Aguero of course with the likes of James Milner and Adam Johnson competing for the remaining berth. It's Johnson who frustrates the most – a shoo in for the England starting 11 if only he could get into the City team regularly. Mancini has said that although he scores and assists goals regularly, cutting in from the right onto his left foot with devastating effect, he tends to rest on the achievement rather than strive for more and negates his defensive duties as a result. In the holding midfield role we have a similar situation to that of Dzeko and Balotelli with De Jong and Toure. De Jong, a Dutch international, showed what he's all about in the World Cup Final – maim them now, ask questions at any subsequent inquest. Toure on the other hand is an awesome figure of a man and all round player – offering as much going forward as he does in defence. We'd rather De Jong play I think, but it's a bit like choosing between a kick in the balls and one in the face. Gareth Barry, much maligned, adds left footed balance to the heart of the team in the same way Faurlin does for Rangers. I know I tip Shaun Wright Phillips as the key man to Rangers’ success every week, I know I say if we can get him going in really wide areas he could do some damage every week, but this Saturday against his former club if we do get him going in wide areas then he may be the only chance we’ve got. Gael Clichy was often in the left wing slot against Villarreal on Wednesday, and City weren’t that crash hot at covering their left back when he did venture forward. A possible chink in otherwise impregnable armour. Links >>> Official website >>> Blue Moon forum >>> Blue Heaven forum >>> Bitter and Blue blog >>> Bert Trautmann’s neck blog >>> The View from a Blue blog Photo: Action Images Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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