Paddy Agnewprofiles the man charged by mega-rich Manchester City to kick-start a glory era for the club
SOME YEARS ago, your correspondent was delegated to present the Foreign Press Player of the Year award to Roberto Mancini. Manchester City’s new manager, then at the end of a glorious career, turned up for our little prize-giving ceremony accompanied by a small delegation from his then club, Lazio.
Seeing the Lazio team director, Maurizio Manzini, among the group, I inquired just why he had opted to come along. Was he worried that Mancini might say or do something inappropriate? Did he feel the need to keep a close after-hours eye on his star player?
The Lazio team director looked at me as if I had lost my senses: “This guy needs no minders. He doesn’t make mistakes. He knows just what to say and what not to say.”
The reality about Roberto Mancini is that for many people in Italian football he has always been a figure of awesome competence, both as player and as coach.
When Sven Goran Eriksson took up the Lazio coaching job in the summer of 1997, his first request to his new club owner, Sergio Cragnotti, took the entire Lazio entourage by surprise. If you really want a title-winning team here, said Eriksson, buy me Roberto Mancini, then 32 going on 33.
The point was that, having coached him for five years at Sampdoria, Eriksson knew all too well just what Roberto Mancini could deliver. He saw him as a key factor in guaranteeing overall performance quality. Mancini was not only an outrageously talented player, much respected by his fellow players, but he was also an obviously intelligent one too.
Eriksson knew all too well that not only would he have an ideal “player-manager” in Mancini, but he would also be drafting in a player who would guarantee that his ideas be quickly assimilated by the Lazio dressingroom.
The rest of this particular chapter in Mancini’s history is, of course, pure fairytale, because that Lazio side went on to win the Italian title in 2000.
Lazio, of course, was the second club with which Mancini won an Italian title as a player, having already won one in 1991 with Sampdoria. However, at the age of 45, he has already done better as a coach, winning no fewer than three titles with Inter Milan (2006, 2007 and 2008).
Mancini has always been a quick starter. He made his Serie A debut with Bologna in September 1981 at the age of 16. As for his coaching career, he cut short a four-week move as a player to Leicester City to take over Fiorentina in February 2001.
The point here, of course, was that the word was well and truly out. People in Italian football knew about him. Fiorentina felt they could take such an outrageous gamble on a total rooky. For their audacity, Fiorentina were rewarded with an Italian Cup trophy and some excellent football under Mancini.
The Fiorentina experience, however, did not last long. By the summer of 2002, he was back at Lazio, this time as coach, for a two-season spell which yielded yet another Italian Cup. More importantly, his two seasons as Lazio coach convinced Inter Milan’s petrol millionaire owner, Massimo Moratti, that Mancini was the man for him.
Thus in the summer of 2004 he moved to the club which has dominated the post-calciopoli (match-fixing) era in Italian football, winning three titles with the strongest squad in contemporary Serie A. Given that Inter had won only one title in the previous 25 years, you might have expected the folks to be grateful.
Not so. If Mark Hughes feels bad about being given the old heave-ho when his side are sixth in the table, how did Mancini feel when he got the push to make way for José Mourinho just days after lifting his third consecutive league title? The problem, of course, was that he had failed to deliver in the Champions League.
So what does all this mean for Manchester City? They have picked up an ambitious, truly talented coach who will probably feel more challenged by linguistic problems than that of handling a dressingroom of international stars. But he has done that before and won titles to prove it.
