Mario Balotelli

[Russ Atmosphere]

Look how big he is compared to those other players.

[Guest davelfc]

He's so big he could stop corners too.

 

Here's the self-proclaimed £4m man:

 

[The Golden Eel]

That famous picture of him sitting at the post looking desolate, apparently someone said "Chin up Neville" and he took it a bit too literally

[Tourt]

This is a great read from the Guardian. Enjoy.

 

It goes back a few years now, but you might remember the old television commercial for Allied Dunbar that Jamie Carragher mentioned the other day, with its version of Irving Berlin’s Let’s Face the Music and Dance and the little scene that unfolds when a man is shaving in the bathroom mirror and finds a pregnancy test at the back of the medicine cabinet. The man is still covered in foam as he marches downstairs to confront his daughters, and that is the point when his wife intervenes. “I think we’re the ones who should have been more careful,” she says. Then the music starts: “There may be trouble ahead …”

 

This was Carragher’s response to the news that Liverpool had decided the good did outweigh the bad when it came to Mario Balotelli and that he was worth a punt. It was a decent price, he said, but he couldn’t help think back to that advert: a settled family taking in the news that a new arrival was on the way and trying to be happy despite that nagging sense that, yes, it might change their lives for their better, but it would also need an awful lot of energy.

Balotelli cost Manchester City £22.5m when he signed from Internazionale in 2010. He was sold to Milan for £19m and his transfer value is now £16m.

 

Liverpool would like to think they have got themselves a steal, and maybe they have when Shane Long has gone from Hull City to Southampton for £12m and Fulham somehow thought Leeds United’s Ross McCormack was worth £11m. Another way of looking at it, however, is that footballers’ transfer fees do not generally depreciate if their careers are on the rise. At this stage of his career, Balotelli should be a £50m player, maybe even higher.

Instead, there is always that sense of someone who has stayed too young too long. The comedian Jean Kittson once asked: “What’s the use of having a totally gorgeous body like Victoria Principal if you’ve got a mind like Victoria Principal?”

 

And the same type of question applies to Balotelli. What’s the use being that talented if there is something, north of his feet, that means it comes out only in sporadic flashes in between all the not-so-good stuff?

 

Liverpool will learn very quickly they have to spend an inordinate amount of time on him. They will like to think, age-wise, he is capable of better life choices at 24 than when he was 20 but for their own sake they should probably know the best policy with Balotelli is always to keep an open mind. It would be wrong to assume he will foul up but, equally, it won’t be easy for Brendan Rodgers, or indeed Liverpool’s psychiatrist Dr Steve Peters, bearing in mind the number of managers, team-mates, advisers and relatives who have tried to knock some sense into Balotelli and ended up wanting to drop a flowerpot on his head. He will always let you down at some point or another. The secret is trying to bring out the good bits the rest of the time.

 

Gazzetta dello Sport has just calculated that in 568 days at Milan he made them 788 different headlines. Mario Sconcerti, writing in Corriere della Sera, neatly summed up the Balotelli phenomenon as “the strange talent of making everyone happy when he arrives and even happier when he leaves”.

 

Balotelli might prove to be a bargain when he is only the fourth most expensive signing at Liverpool this summer, behind Adam Lallana, Dejan Lovren and Lazar Markovic. Yet there must be a reason why Christian Vieri says this is possibly the best piece of business in Milan’s history. Sconcerti was right: there are champagne corks when Balotelli signs, but they neck the whole bottle when he is gone.

 

Liverpool have been sensible to stipulate there are behaviour clauses in his contract (even if this is fairly standard practice) but they will discover there is plenty to like about Balotelli as well. Roberto Mancini, his former manager at City, used to describe him as crazy and flick his fingers beneath his own chin, in that Italian way, but only because he cared about his player. Pablo Zabaleta would shake his head and wonder if “his brain is gone, absolutely” but again it was fondness, mostly, in his voice. Even José Mourinho, whose relationship with Balotelli at Inter often drifted between cold and Arctic, seems to remember the player he once described as “unmanageable” with a degree of affection.

 

Mourinho reckons his book of Balotelli anecdotes would stretch to 200 pages and the one he likes to tell the most is a belter. “We went to play Rubin Kazan in the Champions League. All my other strikers were injured. No Diego Milito, no Samuel Eto’o. I was really in trouble. Mario got a yellow card in the 42nd minute and when I got into the dressing room at half-time I spent 14 minutes of the 15 available speaking to Mario. I said to him: ‘Mario, I can’t change you, I have no strikers on the bench, don’t touch anybody and play only the ball. Mario, if someone provokes you, don’t react. If we lose the ball, no reaction. If the referee makes a mistake, no reaction.” A pause. “The 46th minute: red card.”

 

This, fundamentally, is the issue with Luis Suárez’s replacement and it is the same question that used to be asked of his predecessor but in a different context: can he be trusted?

 

Before everything went sour at City, Mancini was convinced greatness had been thrust on Balotelli. The problem, I always felt, was that Balotelli must have ducked out of the way. A small thing, perhaps, but Google “Balotelli training hard” to find the old YouTube clip of the Milan squad running around the side of a pitch at their training ground. One by one, they have to jog through cones then jump over a series of low hurdles. It is nothing too strenuous – the hurdles are barely six inches off the ground – but Balotelli is having one of his W-for-whatever days. He moves in between the cones, sees what is coming and, accidentally on purpose, misses out the jumps, nonchalantly jogging past while his team-mates complete the exercise. It’s 15 seconds of classic Mario.

 

At City, the coaches recall how they would give him DVDs to swot up on the opposition then realise he was watching Laurel and Hardy movies instead. They remember him being fascinated with the sliding doors at their training ground and driving slowly towards the entrance in his camouflage sports car, mounting the kerb to see how close he could get before the glass swung open. We all know about the scraps, the crashes, the pranks. Everyone remembers him chucking darts from a window at the youth-team players or what happened the night before the Manchester derby when he and his gang started letting off fireworks from the bathroom window (though don’t forget he scored a peach the following day).

 

No one, however, will recall too many games when he lived up to Mancini’s prediction that if Balotelli could stop jumbling his priorities he would be as good as Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. Suárez, for all his behavioural flaws, would give every drop of sweat to that Liverpool shirt.

 

Don’t presume the same will come from his successor. This is a guy who was out with a shoulder injury for Milan recently and posted a photograph of himself on Instagram playing table tennis. Only Balotelli could excuse himself from a game with flu – Milan’s friendly against Valencia last Sunday – then take part in a charity ice-bucket challenge the following day and not understand how it looked.

 

A part of him, I suspect, will always be that overgrown kid, new to England, who went to John Lewis one afternoon to get an ironing board and came back with a quad bike, a trampoline and a giant Scalextric. It is both his charm and his weakness. The good does outweigh the bad, it’s just a close-run thing sometimes and Liverpool, as Carragher implied, should bear in mind it could involve some sleepless nights

[Fugitive]

He's been eating scraps from people's bins.

[Anubis]

Here's the self-proclaimed £4m man:

 

 

Presumably that £4m figure is on the basis he's worth his weight in gold?

[RobbieOR]

That's a fucking terrible article. Taylor cant hide his anti Liverpool bias at all. Using a false anecdote by Mourinho to prove a point is absolutely shite journalism at his finest.

 

Manc gobshite.

[Russ Atmosphere]

Used to love the Guardian football section but it's just Red Issue now, occasionally I read the fiver.

[JermainePennant]

His antics off the pitch are harmless and it wasn't him that let the firework off.I cant excuse him not training properly if that is true but at inter he wouldn't have had the best examples when the main man was ibra and he was doing interviews when he should have been training and telling the staff training begins when hes ready when asked to attend.

[Phoenix]

This is a great read from the Guardian. Enjoy.

 

It goes back a few years now, but you might remember the old television commercial for Allied Dunbar that Jamie Carragher mentioned the other day, with its version of Irving Berlin’s Let’s Face the Music and Dance and the little scene that unfolds when a man is shaving in the bathroom mirror and finds a pregnancy test at the back of the medicine cabinet. The man is still covered in foam as he marches downstairs to confront his daughters, and that is the point when his wife intervenes. “I think we’re the ones who should have been more careful,” she says. Then the music starts: “There may be trouble ahead …”

 

This was Carragher’s response to the news that Liverpool had decided the good did outweigh the bad when it came to Mario Balotelli and that he was worth a punt. It was a decent price, he said, but he couldn’t help think back to that advert: a settled family taking in the news that a new arrival was on the way and trying to be happy despite that nagging sense that, yes, it might change their lives for their better, but it would also need an awful lot of energy.

Balotelli cost Manchester City £22.5m when he signed from Internazionale in 2010. He was sold to Milan for £19m and his transfer value is now £16m.

 

Liverpool would like to think they have got themselves a steal, and maybe they have when Shane Long has gone from Hull City to Southampton for £12m and Fulham somehow thought Leeds United’s Ross McCormack was worth £11m. Another way of looking at it, however, is that footballers’ transfer fees do not generally depreciate if their careers are on the rise. At this stage of his career, Balotelli should be a £50m player, maybe even higher.

Instead, there is always that sense of someone who has stayed too young too long. The comedian Jean Kittson once asked: “What’s the use of having a totally gorgeous body like Victoria Principal if you’ve got a mind like Victoria Principal?”

 

And the same type of question applies to Balotelli. What’s the use being that talented if there is something, north of his feet, that means it comes out only in sporadic flashes in between all the not-so-good stuff?

 

Liverpool will learn very quickly they have to spend an inordinate amount of time on him. They will like to think, age-wise, he is capable of better life choices at 24 than when he was 20 but for their own sake they should probably know the best policy with Balotelli is always to keep an open mind. It would be wrong to assume he will foul up but, equally, it won’t be easy for Brendan Rodgers, or indeed Liverpool’s psychiatrist Dr Steve Peters, bearing in mind the number of managers, team-mates, advisers and relatives who have tried to knock some sense into Balotelli and ended up wanting to drop a flowerpot on his head. He will always let you down at some point or another. The secret is trying to bring out the good bits the rest of the time.

 

Gazzetta dello Sport has just calculated that in 568 days at Milan he made them 788 different headlines. Mario Sconcerti, writing in Corriere della Sera, neatly summed up the Balotelli phenomenon as “the strange talent of making everyone happy when he arrives and even happier when he leaves”.

 

Balotelli might prove to be a bargain when he is only the fourth most expensive signing at Liverpool this summer, behind Adam Lallana, Dejan Lovren and Lazar Markovic. Yet there must be a reason why Christian Vieri says this is possibly the best piece of business in Milan’s history. Sconcerti was right: there are champagne corks when Balotelli signs, but they neck the whole bottle when he is gone.

 

Liverpool have been sensible to stipulate there are behaviour clauses in his contract (even if this is fairly standard practice) but they will discover there is plenty to like about Balotelli as well. Roberto Mancini, his former manager at City, used to describe him as crazy and flick his fingers beneath his own chin, in that Italian way, but only because he cared about his player. Pablo Zabaleta would shake his head and wonder if “his brain is gone, absolutely” but again it was fondness, mostly, in his voice. Even José Mourinho, whose relationship with Balotelli at Inter often drifted between cold and Arctic, seems to remember the player he once described as “unmanageable” with a degree of affection.

 

Mourinho reckons his book of Balotelli anecdotes would stretch to 200 pages and the one he likes to tell the most is a belter. “We went to play Rubin Kazan in the Champions League. All my other strikers were injured. No Diego Milito, no Samuel Eto’o. I was really in trouble. Mario got a yellow card in the 42nd minute and when I got into the dressing room at half-time I spent 14 minutes of the 15 available speaking to Mario. I said to him: ‘Mario, I can’t change you, I have no strikers on the bench, don’t touch anybody and play only the ball. Mario, if someone provokes you, don’t react. If we lose the ball, no reaction. If the referee makes a mistake, no reaction.” A pause. “The 46th minute: red card.”

 

This, fundamentally, is the issue with Luis Suárez’s replacement and it is the same question that used to be asked of his predecessor but in a different context: can he be trusted?

 

Before everything went sour at City, Mancini was convinced greatness had been thrust on Balotelli. The problem, I always felt, was that Balotelli must have ducked out of the way. A small thing, perhaps, but Google “Balotelli training hard” to find the old YouTube clip of the Milan squad running around the side of a pitch at their training ground. One by one, they have to jog through cones then jump over a series of low hurdles. It is nothing too strenuous – the hurdles are barely six inches off the ground – but Balotelli is having one of his W-for-whatever days. He moves in between the cones, sees what is coming and, accidentally on purpose, misses out the jumps, nonchalantly jogging past while his team-mates complete the exercise. It’s 15 seconds of classic Mario.

 

At City, the coaches recall how they would give him DVDs to swot up on the opposition then realise he was watching Laurel and Hardy movies instead. They remember him being fascinated with the sliding doors at their training ground and driving slowly towards the entrance in his camouflage sports car, mounting the kerb to see how close he could get before the glass swung open. We all know about the scraps, the crashes, the pranks. Everyone remembers him chucking darts from a window at the youth-team players or what happened the night before the Manchester derby when he and his gang started letting off fireworks from the bathroom window (though don’t forget he scored a peach the following day).

 

No one, however, will recall too many games when he lived up to Mancini’s prediction that if Balotelli could stop jumbling his priorities he would be as good as Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. Suárez, for all his behavioural flaws, would give every drop of sweat to that Liverpool shirt.

 

Don’t presume the same will come from his successor. This is a guy who was out with a shoulder injury for Milan recently and posted a photograph of himself on Instagram playing table tennis. Only Balotelli could excuse himself from a game with flu – Milan’s friendly against Valencia last Sunday – then take part in a charity ice-bucket challenge the following day and not understand how it looked.

 

A part of him, I suspect, will always be that overgrown kid, new to England, who went to John Lewis one afternoon to get an ironing board and came back with a quad bike, a trampoline and a giant Scalextric. It is both his charm and his weakness. The good does outweigh the bad, it’s just a close-run thing sometimes and Liverpool, as Carragher implied, should bear in mind it could involve some sleepless nights

 

 

Most of it has been said before. Everyone knows his problems.

 

The only issue that will be relevant is training hard and putting the effort in when in the team. If we can get him to do that then he will be worth it. The other stuff isnt relevant.

 

Last chance for him to make it really big. Its whether he has the hunger is the issue. Lets hope he realises that the age of 24 it is his time to make it big in the footballing sense.

 

No amount of cajoling from Rodgers or counselling from Steve Peters will change that.

[therevivalist]

Scary read. What's Rodgers got himself into? We've truly gambled our season on a lunatic. God help us.

[Mook]

The bit about the sliding doors is class.

 

The thing that concerns me is his work rate, not seen much of him since he left City so hopefully he's improved in that area.

[stringvest]

That's a fucking terrible article. Taylor cant hide his anti Liverpool bias at all. Using a false anecdote by Mourinho to prove a point is absolutely shite journalism at his finest.

 

Manc gobshite.

 

it's not a false anecdote - I heard it from Mourinho the other day.

[stringvest]

The bit about the sliding doors is class.

 

The thing that concerns me is his work rate, not seen much of him since he left City so hopefully he's improved in that area.

 

well, if he isn't gone for 8m in January, we might just have a result.  

[RobbieOR]

it's not a false anecdote - I heard it from Mourinho the other day.

 

He didnt get sent off in the 46th minute, it was mid way through the second half of the game. So it is false.

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/competitions/champions-league/6244609/Rubin-Kazan-1-Inter-Milan-1-match-report.html

[Russ Atmosphere]

He didnt get sent off in the 46th minute, it was mid way through the second half of the game. So it is false.

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/competitions/champions-league/6244609/Rubin-Kazan-1-Inter-Milan-1-match-report.html

Eto'o was playing too.

[JermainePennant]

The bit about the sliding doors is class.The thing that concerns me is his work rate, not seen much of him since he left City so hopefully he's improved in that area.

Work rate is not a massive thing for a striker imo as they need to conserve energy for runs, I watched a bit of the Milan friendly the other day and he did chase the defenders down a few times, I only watched the first ten minutes of the second half but his hold up play was impressive aswell.

[Arl arse]

I'm willing to give the lad a clean slate, a fresh start. It's what he does at LFC that matters, all the antics in his past are in his past, can't change them now.

[El Dangerous]

I for one hope he retains a lot of his eccentricities. Most of what he does is harmless, firework/darts aside. He's a big kid no doubt but it's his onfield discipline that concerns me. We might have a chance at improving his work rate so let's focus on that. As long as he stays out of jail then who gives a fuck. It's not like he's hated by team mates neither.

[Bobby Hundreds]

I doubt he will cause as much shit as Suarez did. I'm pretty sure he will fuck up now and then and some will get pissed off and some will defend to the hilt, there will be times when we think he's not shown enough and times when he's great. For 16 million its less of a risk than some of the prices we've seen before 20 million for downing and you knew what you where getting, professionalism a nice good boy who offered the large sum of fuck all when he was here. I think for the fee its a reasonable risk.

[Phoenix]

Work rate is not a massive thing for a striker imo as they need to conserve energy for runs, I watched a bit of the Milan friendly the other day and he did chase the defenders down a few times, I only watched the first ten minutes of the second half but his hold up play was impressive aswell.

 

Workrate involves making those runs. Not just pressing.

 

Thats where we excelled last season.

[Mathewbet1]

we can make him run faster by putting novelty fireworks all around the pitch, he'll scurry around the pitch collecting them explosive bundles of joy.

[stringvest]

oh, I stand corrected

[LFC 6 Times]

I'm convinced he's going to be boss, the fans will give him a level of adulation he's never experienced before, and will be backed to the hilt almost regardless of what he does, he'll with thrive and fulfill his potential. 

[SammyAftershave]

Southall strikes me as someone who enjoys beans on his fry up. Lots of them. He looks like he's got a good fart in him.