Gelson gone

The official site brings us long expected news this morning - that Gelson Fernandes has left City to join AS Saint-Étienne for an undisclosed fee.

The more Fernandes was marginalised last season, the more likely it was that he would leave this summer. And he has joined ASSE - whose General Manager Damien Comolli was Director of Football at Spurs until last October.

Comolli may well have left England with a good impression of Fernandes. For the second half of the 2007/08 season, he looked like quite a find: energetic, hard-working and if not yet in full command of the subtleties of the game then at least on his way to mastering them. But like many of the Eriksson buys he struggled under Hughes and found his chances limited. When he did play - Aston Villa away, Spurs at home, Racing away - he was poor. By the end of the season he was our game-saver - to be brought on with a few minutes left just to sit in front of the back four and slow things down. That he was booed on to the pitch when performing such a role against HSV and WBA is a disgrace to City fans; even worse than the shameful booing of Sylvain Distin in recent matches against Portsmouth.

But his departure is a necessary part of our forward movement. Having cut loose the final remaining Stuart Pearce buys last week, Hughes now has to find buyers for the failed Eriksson buys: Garrido and Benjani, and those whose futures may not be at Mark Hughes' MCFC: Caicedo, Elano, Bozhinov and Petrov. There need to be more departures and more arrivals before this will be unequivocally Mark Hughes' Manchester City, more before we can seriously challenge.