? Owners give backing whatever happens on Monday
? City have the wealth but Ferguson's experience may count
Amid all the dizzying narratives as Manchester faces up to its most momentous of derby matches one central theme is how rapidly sport can change and with it the apparent job security of the modern football manager.
This match, archly selected by the fixture software to wait for the two clubs all season, had barely a fortnight ago deflated for City into a coronation of United as champions where it would hurt most, at home. After City lost to Arsenal, watched grim-faced by the Abu Dhabi-based chairman, Khaldoon Al Mubarak, with Mario Balotelli stropping like an 11-year-old playing his first proper football match, the convincing speculation was that come summer Roberto Mancini would be spending more time with his family.
With City winning three successive games since, and United uncharacteristically wobbling against Wigan and Everton, the derby has become all the Premier League wanted it to be in its 20th year, a super-heated potential title decider. And, the gap narrowed to three points, Mancini suddenly looks safe again.
Al Mubarak, executive for the sheikh who has committed �1bn on reshaping City to better United, has always said they do not plot their "project", particularly so fundamental an issue as the manager, based on such short-term oscillations. Yet had City's early spring wilt continued and United cantered in, the club's owner, Sheikh Mansour, and Al Mubarak were certainly going to question whether they might really need a Mourinho to deliver the prizes all this money is intended to buy. Mancini himself has always perfectly understood the inherent combustibility and insecurity of his own position at City, as the pivotal figure in the cash-fuelled acceleration of a club on a scale unprecedented in the history of football.
This week Mansour spoke publicly about City's progress, a very rare event in approaching four years since he bought the club for his English football adventure. Discussing the derby, Mansour said on Abu Dhabi television: "Whatever happens and even if we don't win, I am very happy and satisfied with the players, the team and the management."
While votes of confidence from archetypal English football club owners have long turned into tomorrow's sad sackings, City sources confirm Mansour knew the importance of that statement in so heady a week and it can be interpreted as a firm intention for Mancini still to be manager next season.
Mancini has a genuinely close working relationship with Al Mubarak and, as he said on Thursday, speaks to him almost daily, unlike Mark Hughes in the latter period of his tenure, to Hughes's cost. So when Mancini stated his own confidence that City will not sack him whatever happens now, it was based on conversations with his chairman, not wishful thinking.
Yet the Abu Dhabi insistence that they do not judge their planned propulsion of City into the European elite by the results in a couple of matches cuts the other way for Mancini too. City's sparklingly improved performances since the Arsenal calamity have not erased the wretchedness of it, nor the 1-0 defeat at Swansea or January and March stumbles which have delivered United the chance to win the title, regardless of the result in the derby.
At the end of the season a regime which holds board-level inquiries and human resources-led investigations when things go wrong at their football club will conduct their performance reviews and expect Mancini to do better. Al Mubarak would say this is true of him too, and every other employee at City, and all the multi-billion pound businesses he runs.
When City's bosses assess Mancini and decide to keep him on they are not under the illusion that he is perfect or the best manager in football. They see great strengths, which is why they hired him and want to stick with him, a decision made easier by the turnaround of the last three games. They believe he is a top football man, with a great pedigree as a player, regard him as a strong character who, in the crucible of action in the biggest matches, keeps his head and makes insightful tactical decisions. Mancini is also seen to have a good eye for talent, having asked for, and had bought for him, top-class players ? including Balotelli, for all his growing pains.
Where Mancini, the insistent taskmaster of young starlets like Adam Johnson, must work harder is in his people skills, his ability to manage the players. That will surprise many City fans, who have taken to his style and, throughout the recent speculation about his position and the tussle with Carlos Tevez, sang in support of him at the Etihad. The press like him too; he is courteous, smiles and is, within his limited English, a charmer.
That is Mancini's paradox, that where the press and fans cannot see him, at training and in the dressing room, he is said to be remote, aloof and can have a coldness towards his players, whom he can habitually rub up the wrong way. In City's coaching structure Brian Kidd and David Platt, more chatty than Mancini and sympathetic to the players' temperaments, are partly there to do the talking he does not, to encourage and provide the warmth which Mancini lacks. When City were losing and Balotelli was embarrassing, Mancini's weak point looked more a problem than it does now, with the team winning and Tevez back conducting himself like a faultless model professional. Mancini is also seen to have addressed already one of the key fault-lines, his team's lack of conviction when the pressure gradually intensified.
After City's 4-0 victory over West Bromwich Albion, in which Tevez started and scored, and United's defeat at Wigan the same night, Mancini's insistence that United would still win the title, after maintaining three days earlier following the Arsenal defeat that City could still close the gap, was transparently a tactic. Yet it is seen to have worked, shielding and easing the pressure off his players. He has maintained that stance ever since: the Premier League is United's, their team has more experience and a great spirit. While not exactly convincing, and at times just a parody of what others have said or written about City, it has contributed to freeing his team from hesitancy, and so his chairman can see he is learning on the job.
When City assess Mancini's suitability for the size of the role there are other major considerations. Offputting is the mighty cost of sacking a manager, with, inevitably, coaching staff and players changing, at a time when the regime is straining to avoid massively exceeding Uefa's permitted financial fair play ?45m losses between 2011 and 2013.
The other is questioning who better is around. Asking themselves which managers have all three attributes ? tactical class, sound eye for talent and motivational expertise ? produces a short list at the top. Mourinho, yes, if they really wanted to take him on, with all that comes with him. Ars�ne Wenger, definitely, who would not come. The greatest, whatever his flaws, who has it all and has stayed 26 years to shape generations, arrives with the opposition on Monday.
For all City fans' antipathy to United, in Sir Alex Ferguson and much else, United have what Al Mubarak's Abu Dhabi project for Manchester City aspires to: the winning culture, scale of international fame and unrelenting commercial exploitation of their "brand". City's 6-1 defeat of United, so long ago in October, felt seismic, a historic supplanting by a Manchester club which has had �1bn committed to it, of the other whose US owners have drained �500m out. City did allow themselves to believe, as one senior figure put it, that 6-1 at Old Trafford was the day the world changed. But then Ferguson's managerial ethos worked again, on a team shorn of gal�cticos, the replacement of Cristiano Ronaldo with Antonio Valencia epitomising relative economising under the Glazers. Scholes returned, United drew on their knowledge of the season's rhythm and clawed City's lead away.
Yet now Mancini, regarded by Ferguson as formidable, has the chance again to take the Premier League from United if rejuvenated City win on Monday. For all the spectacular and unimagined boosting of City, the world has not quite changed in Manchester football. Not yet.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2012/apr/27/roberto-mancini-manchester-city
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