A whole lot of overreaction on here at times. The penalty ''incident'' for one thing ended with the right result for everyone and that was by far the most important point. While there may be a need to clarify who will be taking pens in the future, it is hardly something that can't be sorted. Same goes for Brendan's comments. The newspapers said Brendan had ''blasted'' Balotelli following the incident, when he merely made a point about team etiquette. Some on here have accused the manager of ''chucking [Balotelli] under the bus'', when he made the point that it's important to maintain your level of performance throughout the match, something I think we can all agree is true. We should be accustomed to seeing this kind of hyperbole in the press without get carried away by it ourselves.
I think that Balotelli is a player who, given his talents, could be a great player IF he applied himself in the way that a top class professional needs to, which for me consists in having a steadfast commitment to the task at hand, remaining focussed and determined in spite of the circumstances and consistently working in the interests of the team. The manager has long underlined these qualities as being essential to his philosophy, and I think that when he signed Mario he knew that if he could just get him to take on board this message, even if he couldn't purge him of all his eccentricities, he would have a very useful player on his hands.
I'm not especially hopefully that he can make it in the long-run and by that I mean in three years time I doubt very much we'll be looking back at what a great signing he was, and how he helped transform us into title challengers. But I do think that he will have an important contribution to make between now and the end of the season, and his goals/performance v Besiktas are definitely a step in the right direction. More of that and we might be looking back a player, who despite being a bit of a tw@t, ultimately served some useful purpose in our quest to win trophies/make the top four.
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