Carlos Tevez affair has strengthened Manchester City's Roberto Mancini

The manager might have dealt better with Carlos Tevez and his team were badly beaten but the club and fans are behind him

Carlos Tevez sits behind the manager Roberto Mancini during this month's draw at Fulham. Photograph: Julian Finney/Getty Images
At the unusually packed Manchester City press conference with Roberto Mancini an elephant was in the room and its name was Carlos Tevez. City prefaced proceedings with a statement. The club's in-house lawyer, Simon Cliff, was in attendance and had ordered that no questions, "direct or indirect", would be permitted on the Tevez affair, which is consuming the club in heart and mind. This was in order "to safeguard the integrity of the investigation" into Tevez's non-performance in Munich, which City are conducting so seriously that Cliff is centrally involved in it. Journalists, then, took turns feeding Mancini bait with angelic innocence, tiptoeing round the elephant with: How is team morale? Are things back to normal? Have you calmed down since Tuesday? Mancini did not bite. Instead he enjoyed the stage and the proscribed harmlessness of the questioning. Morale is good, he promised. "We are not in a difficult moment," he said, with assurance. "We are on top of the table," he pointed out. "We can have a fantastic season." Smiling, lean, loving the unseasonal sunshine – "The weather is incredible; I do not know why …" – he appeared genuinely relaxed. And so he embodied the mighty paradox produced by City's week from hell. Whatever the club decides to do with its errant former captain and poster boy at the end of its corporate investigation, Mancini has already won. Tevez's defiance of the manager at the Allianz Arena has resulted in Mancini being wholly supported by the men who own and run City. The entire management, up to the owner, Sheikh Mansour, whom Mancini was political enough to call "the most important person at the club", have united behind the manager to show Tevez who is boss. All the skirting round the big questions hanging in the room meant that others have not been asked of Mancini. One could almost forget that what actually happened on Tuesday was that Mansour's extravagantly expensive City team were thumped 2-0 by a Bayern Munich side who were better drilled and more knowing than City's collection of stars; and that before the game Jérôme Boateng said, with inside knowledge, that the Sheikh's millionaire acquisitions lacked the "togetherness" that the German defender now finds more rewarding at Bayern. City tried to brush that off but then went down to a quicker, more purposeful Bayern team: Edin Dzeko flounced, Pablo Zabaleta struggled to keep his head and Tevez, as he seems to need to do, claimed the headlines for himself with his ultimate defiance. "Togetherness," on the highest stage, did seem rather lacking. Mansour set his sights on the Champions League when he acquired and began to mega-fund City three years ago. After Bayern's victory and Napoli's shrewdly achieved 1-1 draw at Eastlands two weeks earlier City, for all their money, now face a challenge to qualify from the group stage. Yet the Tevez madness has meant few questions have been asked about this more meaningful business of the week. Asked if there really is team spirit at City and not just, as some including Boateng are saying, an assembly of supremely well-paid individuals, Mancini replied: "When you build a new team, which started two and a half years ago, it is important to have good players and also good men. With good men you can build a strong team for the future. This is very important. When you have good men, you can lose some games and it is not important, but in the end you can achieve your target 100%. I have good men. I am sure of this." Tevez's behaviour this week has directly challenged that claim, that City's galactico-style squad is shaped into a team by a core of character. The new City, dedicated to conducting themselves in a proper, sophisticated manner, have a recruitment policy underpinned by Brian Marwood, their head of football administration. He compiles hefty dossiers on even the best-known players, incorporating details on their character, for the board to consider before approving another multi-million-pound purchase. Marwood has explained that the signings of Yaya Touré and Patrick Vieira were made to install players who had experience of winning on the biggest stages. The chairman, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, on his trip to City for the Napoli game, said he believed Mancini now had the squad he wanted and needed. As City's stated policy, delivered at almost unlimited expense, is to have two high-quality players in each position, managerial skill was always going to be vital in handling the top-class players who were necessarily left out. Tevez sulks that now Sergio Agüero and Dzeko have arrived and he is no longer the first name, after the goalkeeper Joe Hart, on Mancini's teamsheet; he has not been treated with befitting respect. The fact that his reaction in Munich to such perceived indignity was so outrageous has meant the club and fans have united behind the manager, and nobody is asking whether Mancini might have dealt with Tevez's barrel-sized ego a little more effectively. When managers are asked how they will cope with upset in-form players who have been left out, the standard English answer has always been: "It's a nice problem to have." Yet here, leaving out Tevez has produced a problem, however much it was the player's own fault, that is so great we cannot even mention its name for legal reasons. Admirable a football man as he is, there are questions to be asked of Mancini. The crumpled nature of Serie A following match-fixing scandals meant that his three titles with Internazionale were not won against the mightiest possible opposition and his sides were out-thought and out-fought in the Champions League. He has yet to prove he is one of the great European coaches, able to instil true team purpose in players taking the Sheikh's shilling. Napoli, having survived a first-half pounding at Eastlands, worked out that City's creative threat mostly comes through David Silva; they wrapped him up in the second half and nearly pinched a win. Tactically, the questions are there, at the top. If any of this was playing on the minds of the men in Abu Dhabi – not that they were thinking of removing Mancini after the mess that was Mark Hughes's sacking – it has been swept aside now as the club rallies to support what Sir Alex Ferguson called "the authority of the manager". It is a very basic position that Manchester City are in, with lawyers, executives, the board, Mubarak and Mansour buried in a process to assert their manager's authority over a player who had always been known, for all his faults, to give 100% and who lifted the FA Cup for City four months ago. The unintended consequence of Tevez's antics in Munich is that the manager he so impudently defied has finished the week of a 2-0 Champions League defeat immeasurably stronger. Smiling, relaxed, supported, Mancini's camp even let it be known this week that once Tevez is gone – which could be at great expense, ultimately to Mansour – they could quite fancy Robin van Persie, yet another Arsenal gem, to add to his collection.