Taylor: Cook under threat

The second interesting insider piece on City in Friday's papers: Daniel Taylor writing that Garry Cook's job as Chief Executive is under threat after recent events:

Manchester City's owners in Abu Dhabi are starting to give serious consideration to the position of the chief executive, Garry Cook, at the end of the season after becoming increasingly perturbed about his leadership style and the frequency with which he has attracted bad publicity...

That particular episode was not under ADUG's watch, but Cook's propensity for saying the wrong thing has started to jar with his employers and also affect the way the supporters consider him.

Interesting stuff. Even more so because it is in such contrast with Ian Herbert's article on similar issues in today's Independent:

The club are also undertaking work to ensure that the chief executive, Garry Cook, hugely valued in the Middle East, is not exposed to any more of the embarrassments which have contributed to his gaffe-prone image. Mubarak and his team are reported to believe Cook was left exposed when a video phone was used to record his declaration, in a bar in New York two weeks back, that City would become "without doubt, the biggest and best football club in the world".

Cook had been assured beforehand that it was safe to deliver a rousing speech to fans at the City-supporting Mad Hatter pub, where he had arrived to present a blue plaque to the bar to mark its affinities. The publicity created by the speech has helped fuel the latest chatter among the enemies Cook has made in the game that he is destined to be ousted this summer, though there is no evidence that this might be the case.

Ian Herbert and Daniel Taylor tend to be on the same page on most City issues so to see them disagreeing like this is fascinating. We'll have to wait a while to see which is proved right but it's certainly an interesting light on recent events.

Herbert: Mancini safe

Ian Herbert of The Independent has a long article in Friday's Independent, claiming that Roberto Mancini is safe as manager even if we fail to make it to the 70 points / 4th place target:

City lost the battle, for sure, 3-1 on the night, 4-3 on aggregate, but it would be foolish to rule them out of the turf war. The detractors who would like the Arab riches to fall on stony ground, and for City's years without silverware to extend for more decades, are fond of imagining that Mancini's grip on the club is a precarious one which may end this summer. But the Italian has a security which his predecessor, Mark Hughes, lacked. The club's chairman, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, wants Mancini to hit the 70-point target in the Premier League this season which Hughes agreed to at a board meeting in August, but the Italian will still be in situ next season if he does not.

The whole article - with insights into Garry Cook and his relationship with the owners - is fascinating but this is good news if true. Providing we don't tank and finish fourteenth I'd be quite keen for us not to change manager again in the summer.

Press conference reax

Henry Winter, Daily Telegraph

In truth, this was a tale of two Cities, the ludicrous land inhabited by Cook and the sang-froid kingdom of Mancini, unlike Cook a proper football man. Mancini was up for the challenge. "If you manage in Italy, living with pressure is the norm,'' he added. "So that won't be a problem for me here. I stayed at Inter for four years which was a record.''

Mancini, elegantly attired, was calmness personified as Cook stumbled through an opening address with all the dexterity of David Brent at the Christmas party. Cook pleaded with his audience to focus on Mancini, not on the departure of the popular Hughes. No chance.

James Ducker, The Times

If he [Garry Cook] survives this, he can survive anything. On the other hand, maybe he should just be sacked for using phrases like “the trajectory of recent results”, which apparently was “below the requirement” of 70 points.

People with a knowledge of football don’t use such terms. Manchester United’s “trajectory of results” did not look too good in February 1996 when they trailed Newcastle United by 12 points but come the end of the season they had won the title.

Ian Herbert, The Independent

Mancini tried to posit the suggestion that the sheikh had asked for a meeting to discuss general footballing issues. "In Italy this kind of thing is normal. It's normal for people in football to do this," he said. Cook tried a similar line, saying "the managerial position was discussed in general terms" at the meeting. "There are no conspiracy theories," he repeated. But the revelation destroys in an instant all those assertions the club has made about its Arab owners having a different, more honourable and pragmatic way of doing business to others in the football world. It is also a major setback for Cook's reputation which, after a gaffe-prone start to his City career, had been starting to pick up.

The press conference

Another big day yesterday - Roberto Mancini's first press conference as City boss - and it was almost as dramatic as the last few. First Garry Cook read out a statement, trying to explain and justify the board's decision to sack Mark Hughes and appoint Mancini mid-season. This included a claim that the job was only offered to Mancini last Thursday. I will let James Ducker take up the narrative:

Having stressed in his statement that City had approached Mancini only after the 3-0 defeat by Tottenham Hotspur last Wednesday, Cook was forced into the most embarrassing of climb-downs when the former Inter Milan coach admitted that he had met al-Mubarak and Sheikh Mansour, the club’s billionaire owner, a fortnight ago. Oops. Cook at that point went crimson and, squirming in his seat, had little choice but to correct his original claims.

As such, his statement that “I think it is important for people to know that Roberto was only offered the job after the Spurs game; we negotiated on Thursday and finalised his agreement on Friday” became this: “Two weeks ago Roberto met with Khaldoon,” Cook said. “After the Spurs game, there were further discussions on a more serious level.

“The [original] discussions were general. They were about football. We were considering our managerial options at the time. It [the manager’s job] was discussed in general terms.”

It was one of the most remarkable examples of someone slitting their own throat in modern football.

Note that Garry Cook's statement was revealed to be false not by some great Woodward and Bernstein operation, nor by a counter-statement from Mark Hughes and Mark Bowen, but by an admission from Roberto Mancini himself. If the new manager, who has an obvious motivation to back up the official board line, can expose flaws in the statement, then it suggests that it will take no great prodding to reveal the whole thing as a sham.

There are so many more unanswered questions, but I will just take one set. Cook said that after the summer recruitment drive the target was changed from sixth place to seventy points. How explicit was this made to Mark Hughes? He certainly denied it in his LMA statement. How far below 70 points would have been ok? Were we not close enough to the necessary average to judge Hughes at the end of the season? And what of the cups? A League Cup semi final is beyond our usual achievement, was this factored in at no point? Cook said that 'the trajectory of recent results' was below our target, but as Henry Winter pointed out:

An eight year-old could have picked holes in Cook's anti-conspiracy theory. Observing that the Premier League target for this season had been changed to "70 points'', Cook rather ignored that the table showed City were on course for that under Hughes. If they win their next two games, Stoke City and Wolves away, City will have 35 points from 19 games, halfway to Cook's target at the midway point of the season.

Anyway, the truth is out now. The manager's job was effectively offered to Mancini after the Hull game; Hughes' fate was left to rest on a dodgy penalty decision against Kolo Touré. In one nostalgic sense this is good news, it tells us that there is something immortal about the soul of Manchester City. We can sell Maine Road, knock it down and move to a 47,000 seater stadium across town, we can get taken over by a Thai Prime Minister and then an Arab Sheikh, we can buy Robinho, Shay Given and Carlos Tévez, but still, in a quite fundamental sense, Peter Swales will always be chairman of MCFC.

Conn: Decision made in Abu Dhabi

David Conn, one of the most insightful reporters of the machinations within football clubs, has written today that the decision to sack Hughes came out of Abu Dhabi, rather than the Cook and Marwood double act:

From Abu Dhabi, Mansour and Khaldoon looked at their Premier League acquisition and considered that they had lavishly improved everything, the playing squad, training ground, stadium and all the supporting infrastructure – of which they believe Marwood's contribution to be a significant plus – but the one area which had stayed the same was Hughes and his coaching staff. They formed the view, which looks hasty to many in football but does not feel that way to them, that if they left Hughes in charge, the performances were not going to improve.

They will say, still, that they wanted Hughes and his team to succeed, and City sources argue that Marwood and Cook gave the manager full support until Mansour's confidence was finally lost.

Reports like this are difficult to evaluate. I suppose I would rather it was Sheikh Mansour who decided to sack Hughes. It's easier to live with being run by an impulsive billionaire owner than it is by his sneaky, whispering employees. A well run football club should be run by experts who work for the owners, I think, rather than the owners running it themselves. We just seem to have the wrong experts. Any chance we can buy David Gill off United?

How it happened, ii

More in today's papers about how we came to replace Mark Hughes with Roberto Mancini. And it looks even worse for Garry Cook, Brian Marwood and Khaldoon al-Mubarak than it did yesterday. Initially, we thought that even though Khaldoon reached out to Mancini after the 1-1 with Hull, that a firm decision was not reached until after the loss at White Hart Lane. We now learn from Ian Ladyman that the decision to sack Hughes was taken after Jimmy Bullard's equaliser:

Last night it emerged a verbal agreement on Mancini’s three-and-a-half-year contract was reached on December 2, as City beat Arsenal in the Carling Cup, but the board wanted to delay the appointment until after tough games against Chelsea, Bolton and Tottenham.

This is bad enough: keeping on a condemned man just to make the new guy's job easier. Worse still is the news that Garry Cook could not find it within himself to break the news to Mark Hughes:

Confronted by Hughes before the game, City’s executive chairman Garry Cook was unable, or perhaps unwilling, to give the man he appointed in the summer of 2008 any assurances about his future.

Some reports, unconfirmed yesterday, suggested that the conversation became heated. Who could blame Hughes if it did?

Cook, after all, was the man who sat in the Abu Dhabi sunshine just five weeks or so ago and mentioned Hughes in the same breath as Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali.

Or as James Ducker reports the same conversation:

“Am I being sacked?” Hughes asked the sheepish-looking chief executive. Cook was non-committal. The man who had told anyone who cared to listen that Hughes was the best young manager around did not have the decency to tell him the truth. Hughes had to wait until after the game to be told to pack his bags during a ten-minute conversation with al-Mubarak, the man who had driven through Mancini’s appointment.

A member of Hughes' coaching staff told the Mail:

‘It was weird,’ said one of Hughes’s inner circle yesterday. ‘Nobody would meet our gaze before kick-off. Our wives were upstairs having their lunch and we were beginning to realise we were effectively out of work. But nobody would actually tell us.’

There's a lot more in the papers today and I will come back to it later in the day. But this all reflects very poorly on those running MCFC.

How it happened

The big question this morning is why now? As I wrote before, I would have been less upset if Hughes was sacked to exploit a window of opportunity for the recruitment of a Hiddink or aMourinho. But he wasn't. He sacked for Roberto Mancini, a man with some time on his hands. Today's papers are naturally full of this story, and shed some light on the situation.

Jonathan Northcroft in the Sunday Times says that this was being planned for some time, and only the Arsenal and Chelsea wins recently kept Mark Hughes in the job:

Khaldoon, who represents Sheikh Mansour, the billionaire Abu Dhabi royal who owns City, sanctioned a change of manager last month after a run of seven consecutive league draws and first met with Mancini on December 3 but delayed appointing the Italian after Hughes masterminded wins over Arsenal and Chelsea.Wednesday’s abject defeat at Tottenham, however, sealed Hughes’ fate. Garry Cook, City’s chief executive and the club’s football administrator, Brian Marwood were thought to be influential in persuading Khaldoon that a change was necessary.

So it seems as if it was the draw with Hull City that drove the board away from Mark Hughes. Which is a big overreaction to what was admittedly a depressing result. But it seems clear from these reports that from that point onwards it was a matter of when not if. To be honest I would rather it was an impulsive reaction to the spineless defeat at White Hart Lane on Wednesday night. But it wasn't. They had been thinking it through for almost three weeks and they still managed to do the wrong thing.

The other point of interest concerns the role of Brian Marwood in all of this. It is reported in the News of the World that Hughes sees Marwood as the Brutus of this play:

The City chief [Hughes] had arrived at Eastlands yesterday meaning business - and not just on the field. He believes he has been stabbed in the back by Cook, football administrator Brian Marwood and technical development manager Brian Kidd...

He confronted Cook and Marwood before the game, accusing the pair of plotting his removal ever since their arrival at the club. Hughes has certainly been undermined in recent weeks, only discovering that the club were actively seeking a replacement when his assistant Niedzwiecki informed him.

A similar paragraph in the Mail on Sunday report reads:

Cook and his football adviser, Brian Marwood, finally decided that Hughes was not the man to lead the club after City's dismal 3-0 defeat by Tottenham and were authorised by chairman Khaldoon Al-Mubarak to move quickly to announce a successor in former Inter Milan manager Mancini.

It would be fascinating to learn just how far this decision was guided by Cook and Marwood, rather than coming from Khaldoon himself. Ultimately, it's information that we will never get access to. And I'm not going to lay into Cook and Marwood - tempting as it might be - because I just don't know how responsible they were for it. But whoever made it, the decision stinks. (On a side note, I am keen to defend Hughes but I think it's wrong for him to think that Marwood has stabbed him in the back. Marwood's job is to provide independent (that is, from Hughes) advice to Cook and Khaldoon using his football expertise. He does not, as far as I can tell, work for the manager. If he's told Khaldoon to sack Hughes then he's wrong, but he has no duty to Hughes. His whole point is his independence from the manager.)

The final point of interest is the players' reaction. We learnt in the 'papers that a delegation of them went to Khaldoon to plead for Hughes' job - and that they included Craig Bellamy, Shay Given and Gareth Barry:

The Welshman confirmed his departure to players amid emotional scenes in the City dressing room following a 4-3 home win against Sunderland, thanking them for their efforts during his 18-month tenure. This prompted a deputation of players led by Shay Given to march to the boardroom to confront Khaldoon and try to persuade him that Hughes should keep his job. They failed.

This is no surprise. The personal bond between Craig Bellamy and Mark Hughes is famously strong, and he is the player I am most worried sbout leaving soon. I suppose this also depends on where Mark Hughes goes next. But so much of this is unknowable for now. These reports, though, do allow us some insight into recent events at Manchester City. And it's all rather upsetting.

Telegraph: Cook in Hiddink enquiry

Quite big news in the Daily Telegraph this morning: it carries a claim from Cees Van Nieuwenhuizen (Guus Hiddink's agent), claiming that Garry Cook has enquired about Guus Hiddink joining MCFC at the end of the season:

“Yes, I did [speak to Cook]. But Guus is happy with Russia. Definitely,” Van Nieuwenhuizen said. “I had a call because I have been working with Garry for 12 years since we worked together at Nike. But I have received calls from all over the world about Guus. There has also been an approach from Juventus.

“He (Cook) asked me if it would be worthwhile having a meeting to discuss the future and what might happen next summer. But I told him that Guus was contracted to Russia."

Interesting stuff. It's come out today that Hiddink is likely to stay with the Russian national side but that isn't really the point here. The simple fact that Garry Cook - and this is presuming that van Nieuwenhuizen is telling the truth - is sounding out potential managers for 2010/11 is fascinating. But then if we are to sack Hughes this May then Hiddink will naturally be near the top of any wishlist, and it only makes sense to lay the preparation now.

This is being reported as a 'pressure mounts on Hughes' story and while it is clearly embarrassing for the club (again, presuming that this Cook/van Nieuwenhuizen conversation took place) I don't think that it has any material difference on Hughes' position. We have heard many times before that Hughes is under pressure and that the board were thinking of sacking him - in September 2008 after the takeover itself, in December 2008 when we were in the relegation zone, and in May 2009 when we only finished tenth. At every instance the board have been more patient than people have expected, and more willing to give Hughes time. He doesn't have carte blanche, and may well not be the manager in 2010/11 but I would be shocked and stunned if the board broke their promise to give Hughes the entirety of this season to prove himself. It's not like we need European qualification to stay afloat.

Cook on January

There will be some spending, but not much:

"Mark has some thoughts and some plans but they are by no means as aggressive as they have been in the past.

"We have a great squad of players that are just getting bedded in and we might find there is more speculation about what we might do than what we actually do.

I'm quite pleased to hear this. I know I've said this before but in one sense it has been quite difficult supporting City in recent years. So much of being a football fan concerns forming relationships with individual players and when we get a whole new squad in every six months that becomes quite a bit harder.

And then there's the problem that it is difficult to buy well in January. We made some crucial improvements in January 2009 but we're now at the point where I'm not sure that anyone we can buy would significantly improve our team. Maicon's obviously better than Zabaleta but he's not exactly going to leave Inter this winter for City. I suppose Matthew Upson would probably be a marginal upgrade on Joleon Lescott but then Hughes might not want to cast off Lescott this quickly.

We could well bring in one or two more players - another right back, a creative midfielder, possibly another holding midfielder - but anything on the scale of summer 2009, summer 2008, summer 2007 or even January 2009 seems pretty unlikely in January 2010.

Cook speaks

The first noise for some time from our CEO. He seems to be making fewer public pronouncements since the failed Kaká deal:

"There was a buzz about the place when we played Arsenal. Everybody's expectations were high but we got disjointed a little bit," Cook told The National.

"We lost Adebayor for a little bit and then international games broke our momentum up.

"Since then we have had a couple of games where we thought we could have probably come away with a better result but that is the way it works."

As ever with these things, the interest is not so much in the comments themselves (there is nothing here to disagree with) but in their existence. It is generally a surprise to hear people from the non-football side of the club talking about football issues. But when compared to the public spats between Shinawatra and Eriksson this is nothing to worry about.

New deal with Etisalat

Another commercial benefit of our being owned by Sheikh Mansour: a deal with the UAE's main internet provider, Etisalat. Garry Cook is delighted:

“The profile of the club is already growing globally, and the ability to effectively expand this growth with tailored communications forms the core of our agreement with Etisalat,” he declared.

“This strategic opportunity allows us to connect to passionate football fans around the Middle East and African regions, providing customized Manchester City content through mobile communications channels.”

The higher our profile and our turnover the better, in a sense. A bit of a shame, though, that Etisalat bars access to all Israeli and 'anti-Islamic' websites (according to Wikipedia, I admit), and that it uses spyware on its customers BlackBerrys. But then if I was serious about moral objections to this sort of thing then I would have refused to watch them when owned by Shinawatra. Which, of course, I didn't.

David Conn on the last days of Thaksin

We have a lot to be grateful to Sheikh Mansour for. Spending £200m on players in twelve months has been rather helpful. We are, if you hadn't noticed, a significantly better team because of it. We have a decent shot at a trophy or two in the next few years, for the first time in my lifetime. I could go on and on but I don't need to.

One thing, though, that needs to be said is this: we ought to be grateful to Sheikh Mansour for what he saved us from, almost as much as for what he has turned us into. Because in the months leading up to the takoever, we were in a real mess. The Thaksin project had been unravelling for some time, but by August we had no money, an owner on the run, players almost being sold without the manager's say-so (remember that August weekend when Corluka and Ireland almost left), and £19m strikers coming in with just as little managerial input. There's nothing quite like a badly run football club, and for those summer weeks, I would go as far as to say that we were in a worse state than any top flight club in English state. Debt, chaos and panic are one thing. But international arrest warrants? That's a whole new ball game.

This is the central point of David Conn's second exclusive City news story, appearing in Saturday's Guardian. And what he reveals suggests that things were even worse than we thought. The biggest single revelation is that Mark Hughes considered quitting, such was the mess he walked in on:

"I made the switch from Blackburn because I thought City was a club with potential, in a good financial position, and there would be money available," he reflected ruefully. "The reality wasn't exactly what was described and sold to me. In fairness we were able to go into the transfer market, but there seemed a focus that players had to be sold, and I realised that maybe the resources weren't in place that I thought."

The Carrington facilities were also not as he had expected, bearing no evidence of investment. "The training ground was not fit for purpose," Hughes recalled plainly. "I was quite shocked by how run down it was. Blackburn Rovers is a good club, well-run and organised, it has top-drawer facilities as a consequence of the money Jack Walker invested, and I made the assumption …" he paused. "That was my failing last year; I made too many assumptions. I assumed that people and facilities would be top quality and it was patently obvious they weren't."

The other man who stepped right into the middle of the mess was Garry Cook, brought by Thaksin in June 2008 to run the club following Alistair Mackintosh's depature and Thaksin's Richard Kimble moment. And, as with Hughes, by August he was regretting his decision to come to City:

Cook felt that the job he had been brought to do, to lead a "renaissance" of City, was impossible, and that "the fabric of the football club had been taken away". He soon realised there was no money; City borrowed from Standard Bank against Premier League TV money not yet received, and bought players on deposit.

"Thaksin's money was locked away. Every bit of revenue was being accelerated and the players were being mortgaged. We got into a position where we couldn't pay the players – and John Wardle [the former chairman who had sold his shares and left the board] was asked to lend the club £2m. I was working stupid hours to make sure I was not missing anything; I was living in this paranoia...

"My wife had packed up everything in our house in the States, the furniture was in transit, and I sat in my hotel room in Cheshire crying down the phone. I felt I had unravelled everything, undone all my hard work, because I had been seduced into this role. I realised I had taken my family into the lion's den."

This is pretty serious stuff. Just think of a possible alternative history here: no buyer comes in late in August 2008, meaning that those late purchases - Shaun Wright-Phillips and Pablo Zabaleta - were never possible. The chaos continues. Hughes and Cook quit later that autumn. Graeme Souness is brought in to keep us up. Thaksin, on the run, can only hope that the club continues to function in his absence. Souness is forced to sell Elano, Martin Petrov, Richard Dunne, Stephen Ireland and Micah Richards. Jô is sent back to CSKA Moscow. Thaksin desperately tries to offload the club to John Wardle or David Bernstein. Souness gets City relegated. Then what: more sales? Administration? The takeover was as good news for what it brought us as for what it delivered us from.

Dunne's departing shot

Dunne made some comments today in a press conference while on international duty for the Republic which left me feeling uneasy:

He said that it had not been his choice to leave and that he had been forced out:

"They signed the players and that was it. I wasn't given the opportunity to stay and fight for my place. That's what was annoying. I was told I had to go and that's the frustrating part about it.

"They told me they had accepted an offer so I said 'OK, but what if I want to stay and fight for my place?' They said 'it's funny, we need the money'."

These did not make particularly comfortable reading. As I wrote yesterday, Richard Dunne was MCFC's greatest servant of the modern era, a man who would run through fire for the club, who saved us from relegation under both Kevin Keegan and Stuart Pearce. Nine seasons, three as captain, over three hundred games, four Player of the Season trophies - it all adds up. So these accusations - that he was forced out against his will - were rather worrying. But they are nothing compared to what Dunne is quoted as saying in Friday's Daily Mail:

'The manager is very quiet, he does his own thing and I spoke with him a few times through the summer about what was going on. He was of the opinion that City needed two players for every position and that was the way the squad was going to work.

'The last time I spoke to him was in Africa after I had found out some other stuff. I said, "Where do I lie in the whole thing?" and he said they were trying to sign players and I would be part of his squad and I could fight for my place. He said I was still the captain and even last week he said to me he would rather I stayed but he was told we needed to get money in. I don't think it was his decision.

'They told me they have a certain amount of money they have to recoup each season to make things look better on the books. I could understand if I was being sold for £200m, it might make sense, but it was a bit strange really.

'It just needed people to be honest with me. I was getting phone calls from people saying Garry Cook was trying to sell me behind my back, two months after me going to him and saying if he has any problems to come and deal with me. I'm disappointed with people who say one thing and then do the other.'

There's quite a bit more than just this there - and there may be even more in other newspapers - so do read all of it. But these accusations, if true, are genuinely upsetting. Few City fans will quibble with Mark Hughes' footballing decision to replace Dunne with a quicker, classier, more astute alternative. I certainly do not. But to treat Dunne in such a way having made that decision; to deny him the right to fight for his place at City - and to do it all behind his back - is an insult to Dunne's service to Manchester City. Moreover, it is a failure of command from Cook, given how much emphasis the new regime places on acting with respect for the traditions of the football club.

Selling Richard Dunne was always going to be difficult. But it could have been done with dignity and grace. By this account, it was not. This leaves an unpleasant taste. And it betrays a quite unappealing side to our Chief Executive.

Cook interview

Ian Herbert's reporting from South Africa has been excellent, and today is no exception. He has yet another interesting interview - this time with Garry Cook.

The most interesting aspect, for me, is his discussion of the investment the club's owners have ploughed into areas aside from simple player recruitment: the offices, the training and medical centres, the website and so forth:

These questions and others have been answered this summer in an overhaul of Manchester City – a new ticket office with a roof to queue under, a £4m office block delivering City staff from below ground into daylight, a superior press room – which takes the Abu Dhabi United Group's spending on the infrastructure of the club to nearly £20m. The Premier League's most advanced website – City has employed experienced journalists on content, and attracted 20,000 fans to a free live feed of the fixture against Kaizer Chiefs on Tuesday evening – is the most ambitious new way of connecting. "Football has an anomaly to it where you kind of lay down all of the common sense values that you apply and it's pride and passion that leads you to your destiny," Cook says. "We want to improve the product and to connect with our customers." He has sold 50 per cent of season tickets online this summer, against a previous best of 12 per cent.

I must say that I have been very impressed by the new website. It's attractive, easy to use and has all the free multimedia content you could wish for. And streaming the Vodacom Challenge games was a great move.

Eto'o deal off

Big news from MCFC this evening: the pursuit of Barcelona's Samuel Eto'o has been called off. In a statement on the website Garry Cook has said:

“Samuel Eto'o is undoubtedly a fine footballer but the circumstances surrounding him were such that the deal could not be completed.

“We now feel the time is right to pursue other avenues and we have a clear and strategic transfer plan, which we continue to follow.”

Daniel Taylor claims in Saturday's Guardian that Eto'o failed to accept within a timeframe imposed by the club, which sounds very likely. The more Eto'o prevaricated, the more clear it became that his heart was never really in it - and why, if we're honest, would it be? - and so it makes sense for the club to cut the cord rather than to take on what would be a wholly mercenary player:

Mark Hughes, City's manager, had spoken of the need for "patience" over Eto'o but the player's prevarication – he led City to believe he was keen before appearing to change his mind and then declining to give a clear answer – was beginning to affect City's rebuilding plans. Eto'o wanted perhaps as much as 50% of the transfer fee as a signing-on fee, on the basis that he could leave Barcelona on a free next year.

It's for that reason that I am intensely relaxed about this. Yes, Eto'o is a centre forward of truly world class, the sort that we have never seen at City before. (Was Francis Lee, at his peak, nearly as good as Eusebio or Pelé?) But the sort of big money deal required to see him in blue - with up to £200,000 per week and that absurd signing-on fee - has always left me a bit cold. I was not distraught when we failed to sign Kaká, and I am not desperately enthused with the prospect of our signing John Terry.

I know that players like Eto'o, Kaká and Terry are steps beyond what we now have, and I know that we can't get to where we really want to be without them. But there's something about a mid-table club (tenth last year, with fifty points, let's not forget) signing the world's very best (a bracket into which Robinho does not fit) which does not sit that well with me. I don't want to see us assemble a team based solely on cash-lust (of course it plays a role in all of our signings to an extent, but in some more than others), and, in a quite genuine sense, I don't want to be seen to be taking the piss.

I am very excited about a potential Carlos Tévez - Roque Santa Cruz pairing next season. And the arrival of a centre forward better than either of them, but at the club for different reasons, is not something I could wholly and honestly celebrate. So the fact that we'll line up with that all South American pairing next year, with Bellamy and Bozhinov in reserve, is for me more than satisfactory. I know that we are now, in American, 0 for 2 in our attempts to attract a true galactico to Eastlands. But I don't mind. Tévez and RSC should give us a decent shot at sixth, and neither of them will ever be embarrassed to pull on the shirt.

Changing the language

Garry Cook has today talked about the importance of changing the language around the club:

"There were two phrases which struck me when I first came here - 'typical City' and 'City till I die'," he said in the Manchester Evening News.

"They tell you two things about the personality of the culture.

"'Typical City' says to me, 'We're not very good, but it's OK'. It means you are embarrassed by mistakes - you shouldn't be, because we all make mistakes.

"It's also an excuse for when you do make a mistake. You can just say, 'Well, that's us'.

He certainly has a point. Some of Garry Cook's management speak can grate slightly, but I think on this sort of key issue he's absolutely right. The phrase 'typical City' not only represents a long-ingrained culture of failure but also perpetuates it. And to combat this, we need a two pronged approach: not only to improve our football, but to improve the discourse as well - so that success is presumed and defeats require explanation. While Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool do certainly have better playing squads than the other Premier League teams, their winning mentality does also have a causal role in their continued success.

And so creating such a winning mentality at City is a central part of Cook and Mark Hughes' mission.

It's also worth pointing out that this is not simply a post-takeover analysis from Cook. In an interview with Henry Winter during the final weeks of the discredited Thaksin regime, he said this:

“We’ll be as big as Manchester United. If I didn’t have that goal, I wouldn’t be here. Can we win the Premier League? Yes. Will we? It might take a bit longer. Can we win the Champions League? Growing up at Nike, you don’t sit around saying, 'Can we?’ You say, 'We will’.

“I’ve got to change the culture here. I talk to my employees about it. You get 'This is England, not America, you know’. And then 'This is Manchester, not London’. And then 'This is City, not United’. So do you roll over, play dead and go home? No. Today you can grow faster than it took United. We just need a superstar."

The idea that City needed 'a superstar', rather than a whole team of them, sounds rather antiquated now.

Cook speaks

There's an interesting Garry Cook interview in Saturday's Times, done by Oliver Kay. He covers a host of topics - implying that we're moving for Carlos Tévez, saying that the Kaká saga didn't put him off trying similar moves in the future, and underlining the key theme that the new owners want to build long-term sustainable success.

But there's two other things I want to pick up on. Cook, while defending Hughes, attacked the Eriksson regime and the legacy it left at the club. I've written about this before but it's been a central part of both Hughes' approach to managing City, and Hughes' public pronouncements on City. And now Hughes is sure in his position, Cook takes up two of the core criticisms of the Eriksson regime:

"People talk about the previous season under Sven-Göran Eriksson, but for the second half of it we were close to relegation form. Since then it's a clear upward trend and that will continue."

And then:

“Mark admits he made an assumption that players wanted to come in, train hard and go through their dietary requirements. He made the assumption that gym and medical facilities were Premier League quality. Then he got here and realised they weren't."

There are two strategic benefits to this approach. One is that it creates a mandate for all of the changes Hughes made when he gets here - from intense fitness sessions to dropping Elano. The more he paints 2007/08 as a dismal failure, the more room for manouevre he has. It's a standard tactic - how many times has Harry Redknapp mentioned two points from eight games this season? But the second way is more important: by building up the importance of the necessary changes, he has his excuses in early for any 'teething problems' that may occur. In the relegation zone in December? Don't worry - they're still ironing out problems they inherited. I don't mean this as criticism - it's perfectly understandable. What is interesting though is that Garry Cook has totally adopted the Hughes discourse, just days after Hughes' future at the club was assured.

It's nice to hear how enthusiastic Cook is about the team, too. He says:

"It has been a rollercoaster. I cried when we equalised at Blackburn. I had to ask for a cigarette after the penalty shoot-out in Aalborg in the Uefa Cup."

I know there's a hint of the management speak expert about Cook, but when you hear him talk about City he does seem genuine; and so I'm inclined not to be cynical and take him on his word about this. The downside of the management speak aspect of Cook, though, is that he can come up with sentences which really struggle to mean anything. And he uses one of the strangest analogies I've ever heard:

We called it the bowling-ball syndrome. Every time you opened a cupboard, another one landed on your head.

I have quite literally no idea what that means. If you can extract any meaning from it, please leave it in the comments.

Cook backs Hughes

From today's Guardian.

Garry Cook, Manchester City's executive chairman, has given Mark Hughes a vote of confidence ahead of Thursday's Uefa Cup tie against Aalborg by insisting there are no plans to review the manager's position at the end of the season.

Cook, speaking at a fans' forum, said the club's owners in Abu Dhabi understood the need for continuity and are happy for Hughes to remain in place. The manager has come under sustained criticism from some supporters, but City's form has improved since January and Cook's announcement drew applause from the audience.

New club appointments

From mcfc.co.uk

Graham Wallace, Chief Financial & Administration Officer

Responsible for leading and managing all Club financial matters in addition to overseeing the Information Technology, Human Resources, Legal and Administration functions. He joins the Club from IMG, where he is Senior Vice President of Finance for IMG’s worldwide Sports Media and Entertainment businesses.

David Pullan, Brand and Marketing Officer

Responsible for growing the Club’s supporter base. He joins the Club from Aegis Media, where he was President of Isobar Global Client Management.

Brian Marwood, Football Administration Officer

Responsible for supporting the Football Manager by building world-leading football infrastructure which will meet Mark Hughes’ requirements in terms of academy liaison, overseeing of medical, sports sciences and performance analysis, talent identification and player support.

As Danny rightly suggests, 'Marwood appears to very much be a 'Cook man', so does his appointment then suggest further evidence of Hughes's position being secure for the long term?' Given that Cook is effectively tied to Hughes, I'd like to think that bringing in Cook's former colleagues to work with him suggests a commitment to the current management structures beyond the 2oo8/09 season. But, as a pro-Hughes City fan, I may just be reading more into this than I ought to.

Winter on Marwood

Interesting stuff on the role of our new 'Football Administrator' from Henry Winter today:

The board confirmed that Brian Marwood, formerly of Arsenal and England, will arrive from Nike to coordinate football administration, liaising with the dressing room, academy, sports science department and even organising protection for players’ houses while they are away on European duty (a sensitive issue in the North West after attacks on the properties of United and Liverpool players).

He is not a technical director. Repeat not. Knowing he would have to explain Marwood’s role to Hughes, Cook used the apt analogy of a winger serving a centre-forward. In City’s new chain of command, Marwood reports to Hughes. A popular figure within football, Marwood could prove a real ally for City’s manager. Along with Bellamy, Nigel de Jong and Shay Given, Marwood represents a smart signing by City’s executive chairman. Furious at losing such a valued employee, Nike’s top brass went ballistic with Cook.

The article also confirms that Garry Cook has aligned himself with Hughes before the club's owners.