Quote:
Brendan Rodgers is misguided in singling out Mario Balotelli for criticismThe Liverpool manager should not be surprised by his striker – and has more to ponder than the swap heard around the world
• Balotelli’s half-time shirt swap leaves Rodgers fuming
• Madrid and Cristiano Ronaldo teach Liverpool a harsh lesson
• Mario Balotelli at Liverpool: the story so farShare 97
inShare.0Email It was another tough evening for Mario Balotelli, who was replaced at half-time of Liverpool's defeat to Real Madrid. Photograph: Carl Recine/Action Images
Funny things, football shirts. It is apparently OK to reinvent, redesign and aggressively retail your club’s shirt from season to season. Or to cover it with adverts and market it as an object of desire at a price that is beyond the sensible reach of most fans. This is to respect and value and cherish the shirt.
On the other hand taking the shirt off at half-time in order to conduct an ill-timed exchange: this is entirely unacceptable, a debasing of the hallowed fibres, a knee to the guts of the hard-working fan, and a crime to be punished at the earliest opportunity by a convenient post-match public shaming. Ideally, a public shaming to be a carried out by the same manager who had no idea – Mario: who knew? – that this kind of thing might happen when he signed a player to whom this kind of thing pretty much always happens.
And so here we are. If we really have to do this – and apparently we really, really do – it is probably best to start off by pointing out the disjunct between the bare facts of Liverpool’s 3-0 home defeat by Real Madrid and the post-match furore over Mario Balotelli making the dunderheaded decision to swap his shirt with Pepe at half-time.
For a start the latter has no causal relationship with the former. The future ownership of Balotelli’s shirt had no bearing on Liverpool’s understandable inability to compete, beyond 20 minutes of high-tempo pressing, against the most expensively assembled squad ever, garlanded with an all-time great player at the peak of his powers.
The looming spectre of Balotelli’s shirt removal – or even the listlessness of Balotelli’s pre-removal performance – did not force Glen Johnson to lose the flight of the ball for the second Madrid goal. There is no correlation between Balotelli’s insufficiently inspiring body language and the persistent structural and personnel problems in Brendan Rodgers’ defence.
Similarly Balotelli carries a collective rather than personal responsibility for Liverpool’s inability to close down that princely but still – surely against the very best – vulnerable central midfield. Toni Kroos was a commanding presence in the first half at Anfield. But he did seem to have a lot of space within which to stroll about doing his commanding once Liverpool’s adrenal, fast start had begun to lag.
From a certain angle it seems clear enough why Rodgers made such a fuss over what is essentially an emotive, peripheral issue. Balotelli has already stretched his manager’s patience thin. This was the night Rodgers decided to cut him loose a little, to cash his player in against a disappointing performance, harnessing rather than fighting against Balotelli’s distractingly overblown presence in order to avoid having to linger on a one-sided home defeat.
Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers comments on forward Mario Balotelli’s shirt-swap
This is simply the kind of thing managers do, although in this case there are a few problems. For a start Rodgers may have gone a little early on this one. It was hardly a disastrous result. Anybody can lose 3-0 to Real Madrid and Liverpool still have a decent chance of getting out of their Champions League group. Better perhapssimply to concentrate on talking up a fine opponent while admitting that his team needs to work on defending crosses and set pieces.
If only. Whatever happens from here Balotelli is surely going to be watching much of it from the outside. This is a player who for all his preening extroversions is clearly a fragile soul and for whom, right now, playing football appears to be a painfully abrasive experience. Perhaps the correct response might be concern rather than censure. Pity, sympathy, indulgence: these are not qualities that sit easily in football, which generally concerns itself with being infuriated at signs of weakness and disregarding the emotional wellbeing of players on the grounds that they earn a lot of money and get to kick a ball every day. But even the rich are allowed to be a little vague, a little unhappy, a little misguided. And Balotelli, for all his infuriating neediness, simply looks lost right now.
Which brings us to the broader point. What did Rodgers really expect to happen here? Balotelli is often described as unpredictable. He isn’t. He’s entirely predictable. Predictably enigmatic, predictably unpredictable, predictably troubled. This is a player who, while he was at Internazionale, had to be ordered to stop wearing a Milan shirt around the city, having apparently failed to grasp that this would annoy some fans. To rail against this otherworldliness, to adopt a posture of shocked surprise that Mario – no, not Mario – has done something silly or drifted grandly to the fringes at just the wrong moment is a bit like buying a papier mâché top hat and then becoming inconsolably enraged when it fails to keep the rain off.
In a wider sense Balotelli embodies a long-standing confusion in sport between the precise extent and meaning of talent. Ultimately it is the ability to harness, express and exploit a natural gift that defines the extent of that gift. Talent is as talent does. A level-headed, fearless player has a talent for being level-headed and fearless: a player who lacks these qualities lacks a certain aspect of what represents genuine sporting talent.
There have been some sublime performances: Germany in Warsaw two years ago; Manchester United at Old Trafford three years ago. But perhaps in the end Balotelli’s inconsistency is not a sign of a mystery waiting to be unwrapped but simply the measure of what he can achieve. Here is a striker with four goals in his last 30 games for Liverpool and Manchester City. This may or may not be enigmatic. But it’s definitely not enough.
Rodgers has an excellent record in improving attacking talent and perhaps he can still engage profitably with his listing No9. But for now, blaming Mario for being Mario – having signed Mario in the full knowledge that Mario is Mario – is unlikely to lead anywhere profitable.