Sacking reax

Sam Wallace, The Independent

In the space of one afternoon, Manchester City became a very different club. The kind of club who leave their struggling manager marooned on the touchline while the news of his demise spreads around the stadium. The kind of club who allow their manager to absorb his own fate in the full glare of the television cameras while his successor has already been anointed.

Every step of the way on Saturday, City got it wrong. First, they made Hughes wait until after the win over Sunderland to learn his fate officially, although he, like everyone else, had known the truth for a lot longer.

Henry Winter, Daily Telegraph

No class. No intelligence. No credibility. When Khaldoon al-Mubarak became chairman of one of English football's most famous footballing institutions, the feeling was that Manchester City were in good hands. No more.

Until his craven decision to sack Mark Hughes on Saturday, Mubarak had seemed a breath of fresh air after the stench of the Thaksin Shinawatra era. Of course, there was all the nonsense of rushing in Robinho without proper consultation with the manager or consideration over whether the Brazilian had the requisite character. Of course, there was Mubarak's similarly misguided pursuit of Kaka but that was as much down to the naïvety of his excitable chief executive, Garry Cook.

Matt Lawton, Daily Mail

But Cook lost his nerve and proved, yet again, just how ill-suited he is to the role he believes he is performing - not just turning City into one of the most successful clubs in Europe but one that commands respect.

To do that, you need a bit of class, a bit of style. But the manner in which Hughes was dismissed, indeed the manner in which Cook has conducted himself since moving from Nike to the City of Manchester Stadium 19 months ago, would suggest he is seriously lacking in such qualities.

Oliver Kay, The Times

The rights and wrongs of Hughes’s dismissal have been debated elsewhere — a personal view is that he was on the right track and should have been given until the end of the season — but, from the outside, even when aware of his troubles in dealing with characters such as Robinho and Emmanuel Adebayor, it looks like a board hitting the panic button.

Oliver Holt, The Mirror

But now City will have to reap what they have sown.

First of all, that will mean a widespread loss of goodwill. Because the way they've behaved towards Hughes shows that, actually, they've got less class than Chelsea, not more.

Hughes was one of the reasons why a lot of neutrals still liked City even when others were put off by what they saw as the vulgar show of wealth from Sheikh Mansour in the transfer market. Hughes' quiet, dignified style was the antidote to that.