Neither Manchester empire could summon a real artist in last night's 156th derby, writes PAUL HAYWARD
THE FIRST Manchester City manager to tangle with Alex Ferguson – Jimmy Frizzell, once of Greenock Morton and Oldham – took the club the Abu Dhabi ruling clan now own into the Second Division at the end of the 1986-87 campaign and was fired.
Roberto Mancini is unlikely to sink so far but he has felt the same Scottish hand exerting downward pressure on his head. Sixteen City managers have been and gone in Ferguson’s 24 years and the great survivor has seen off 12 of them in top-division combat, so at least Mancini knew what he was up against when City’s plan was hatched to supplant United as the biggest noise in a metropolis that can now claim to match Milan for frenetic municipal rivalry.
The aspiring faced the deeply established in the 156th Manchester derby as Mancini was lumbered with the additional stress of experts saying there would never be a better time to inflict pain on the neighbour. The gastric discomfort had been all United’s in the build-up to this match but it was hardly calming for City’s stomachs to be told their rivals were there for the taking.
Both sides appeared with only one striker as the city glowed with mutual hostility. The depth of the threat to United posed by City was expressed in Ferguson’s starting XI: a robust central midfield of Paul Scholes, Michael Carrick and Darren Fletcher, with Dimitar Berbatov alone up front and Nani and Park Ji-sung wide.
At the same time Mancini has yet to prove he has the joie de vivre to go with all that spending. He mistrusts the idea that sometimes big games are won the way Harry Redknapp tries to win them at Spurs: with cavalry bugle in mouth. Never mind that Tottenham demolished Mancini’s old club, Internazionale, in the Champions League at White Hart Lane, with just that approach.
Often Carlos Tevez, the main match-winner, looks to have been tacked on to the front of this City side, as a reluctant concession to positivity. If sound Italian instinct is prompting Mancini to construct from the back he will need to keep selling the evolutionary principle to the club’s owners, as well as some of his players.
Some City players, though, want to up the pace of change. Towards the end of the first half Yaya Toure set off on a bullocking run from the halfway line and stopped only when he threw himself into Nemanja Vidic on the edge of the United penalty area.
Minutes late he tried it again and met a similarly messy end. Scholes, who has faced all manner of City sides, weak and strong, in the last 15 years, was bundling blue shirts over and snapping at legs en route to a caution.
Mancini’s problem was the impossibility of manufacturing quickly a quality United possess in abundance: a consistent winning identity that is born of continuity and experience stretching back 20 years. City want to but United know how to. This is the imbalance that requires correction.
Without the added frisson of Wayne Rooney turning out in red, days after he had indicated his desire to pursue a new career in blue, the night was more tense than turbulent. With Scholes in his deeper-lying twilight years, an absence caught the eye. Neither empire could summon a real artist, a player of inventiveness and unpredictability, unless you count Dimitar Berbatov or Nani.
Certainly no such claim could be made for a City midfield comprising Gareth Barry, Nigel De Jong, James Milner and Yaya Toure. The first club to buy a Mesut Ozil or Wesley Sneijder will have landed a heavy stylistic blow.
City have proved already this season the presence of intestinal fortitude in this squad. To beat Chelsea here required real unity and physical strength. But from over the fence Ferguson keeps up a regular barrage to illustrate their weaknesses, which are, as he enumerates them: their presumption, their gaucheness (at boardroom level) and their inability to see that title-winning teams evolve, as even Chelsea’s did, and are not thrown together by money.
In other words Ferguson is reciting to Mancini the doubts he may already have in his head. This week Ferguson’s “noisy neighbours” pulled out a ladder and climbed. Now they are “screaming from the rooftops,” he alleges he likes this house imagery. It is at once provincial and grand. It speaks of people trying to share a city and attempting to outshine each other, as they do in Milan. Mancini stands on the touchline, in his City scarf, and holds his nerve.
Guardian Service
