Man City sack Mark Hughes, appoints Roberto Mancini as new boss

Mark Hughes' time at Manchester City has to come to an end (Sky Sports images)


Over the festive period, it looks like there is going to be an Italian job undertaking at Eastlands as former Interazionale manager Roberto Mancini takes over the reins as Manchester City manager in place of Mark Hughes.

Mancini enjoyed sustained success at Inter - winning the Scudetto on three consecutive seasons and two Coppa Italias from 2006 - albeit two of the league titles from controversial circumstances from Juventus' Calciopoli match-fixing scandal.

The 47-year old has had a glimpse of English football with Leicester City, playing four games for the Midlands outfit. He was quoted in the Sunday 20th December edition of the News of the World saying he really enjoys the English style of football. He must have really enjoyed his four games there!

Mark Hughes was always under pressure from delivering consistently good results, whilst instilling an entertaining brand of football to keep Man City fans and owners, especially, leaving very happy. While he most certainly provided the latter, the results never fell his way, and ultimately the seven straight draws from October into November proved his undoing.

Spending some £217m on players during his stay left lingering high expectations of breaking the 'big four', and from the offset - with four victories at the start in as many games - it looked like Hughes could fulfil the huge targets the Arab owners had initially set. But players became disillusioned by the odd Premier League performances over the autumn and seemingly lacked total confidence in the manager.

It can also be argued that he was never in his comfort during his tenure at Eastlands. His reputation as a manager that gets the best out of a small pool of players with a small budget to work from was where he crafted out his success. Instead, he comes to Manchester knowing under the ownership of rich Dubai-based businessmen Nayran family, he will have a bottomless pit of money to invest in players.

Truth be told, he has never managed a world-class pool of players as large as he experienced at Man City, and juggling to keep all his wealthy players happy proved an insurmountable task in the end, even if he had such a short time to make a huge impact.

And invest he did. He purchased players with experience in playing in the Premier League, for instance with Carlos Tevez, Gareth Barry, Emmanuel Adebayor, Shay Given and Kolo Toure to name a few. But most of the players purchased never have never won major honours at their previous clubs, with possibly the exception of Tevez. Whilst the players Hughes bought were very talented, they were psychologically linked as the 'nearly' men, and often at times during this season Man City lacked the ruthlessness to kill off weaker teams at home, such as Hull and Fulham.

While two defeats in 17 league seem Hughes can do no wrong, the huge pressure of expectation set quickly caved in on him.