Mario Balotelli’s scapegoating hides the real issues at Liverpool
Alyson Rudd
Published 1 minute ago
the game blog
It has been a week of scapegoating. Nice word, “scapegoating”. It sort of conjures up images of goats using Skype or skyscrapers being scaled by goats. What it means though, is to be mean spirited while refusing to accept responsibility. It is about using the blame game and moral indignation to deflect from your own weaknesses. It is not so very nice at all.
Mario Balotelli has been more or less a scapegoat all season - he’s no Luis Suarez, if only he was a bit more like the Uruguayan, if only he ran around more and pouted less. Balotelli is what he is - a curious choice to fill the void left by one the most effective strikers the Premier League has ever seen. He is also a prime example of hubris. When Balotelli was signed, Brendan Rodgers said that he would not only make sure the Italian played well, but that he would make the striker a better person.
Neither prediction looks close to being fulfilled, although the second one was patently ridiculous. It is not a football manager’s job to meddle with the soul of his players. The hypocrisy is staggering. Rodgers was not at all happy that Roy Hodgson said, publicly, that Raheem Sterling had told the England manager he was tired. However, it is fine to state publicly that a player needs to improve as a human being?
The scapegoating of Balotelli reached its nadir as Liverpool were dismantled by Real Madrid. In the Sky studio Graeme Souness was so outraged by the former Manchester City forward’s marking that he spluttered so much he could barely say Balotelli’s name. And then came the shirt swap. There are two ways of interpreting the shirt swap.
Version One: Pepe, a player prone to asking for someone’s shirt at half time, asks to swap with Balotelli. The Italian, being a well brought up young man, accedes to a fellow professional’s request. His timing is slightly awry as he can be seen taking his shirt off before he has properly reached the tunnel and privacy, but he has his back to the cameras and the stadium and probably felt the moment was pretty private all the same.
Version Two: Balotelli hates being asked to play as a lone striker, hates being asked to play alongside Sterling, hates Liverpool’s high energy pressing, hates being asked to work harder and holds his club in such low esteem that he will give away his shirt, not at the final whistle, but before the game, a crucial Champions League tie, is even finished.
“It is not something I stand for,” Rodgers said. “That is something you do at the end of the game and I will deal with it.”
It is to be hoped he does not expend too much energy while doing so. There is a defence that needs dealing with in the short term and, looking a bit further ahead, there is a philosophy that needs adapting, too, in the wake of the loss of Suarez. Rodgers is clearly not building his team around Balotelli. At times, it feels as if he is still building it around Barcelona’s new striker.
There was a strong whiff of scapegoating around Liverpool’s previous match, at Loftus Road. Harry Redknapp is under pressure, his team sit at the foot of the Premier League table and they suffered horribly as a leaden-footed Liverpool were outplayed but still grabbed a late, dramatic winner. There was rather a lot Redknapp could say about the game but he chose to find a scapegoat in the form of Adel Taarabt. The former Spurs player did not feature in the actual match, he was not even on the bench, but his lack of fitness so annoyed his manager that he used Taarabt’s weight issues as evidence that the QPR job is a particularly tough one.
“He played in a reserve game the other day and I could have run about more than he did,” Redknapp said. Unsurprisingly, Taarabt hit back and their row became almost comical until Tony Fernandes, the chairman, was forced to step in and tell them to stop being so embarrassing.
Still, it meant attention was deflected from the QPR own goals and the fact they threw away a match they had controlled.
Excuses are part of the game. Referees are often blamed, as is the weather, the scheduling, the pitch, the traffic, injuries and illness. When individuals are singled out, it is an excuse too far. Both Balotelli and Taarabt are gifted players with chequered histories. It is the management of such players that partly defines coaching ability. If they are used as scapegoats, it says more about their bosses than about them.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/sport/football/the-game/article4245329.ece?shareToken=e816a01d083f6b2b5dc3641776958afd