BLACK FOREST GATEAU or a standard, orthodox chocolate cake? Or perhaps some sort of sponge cake or Father Ted-style cake jumper?
These are the pressing questions Manuel Pellegrini faces as he tries to keep Yaya Toure at Manchester City. It is the midfielder’s birthday next week and apparently he wasn’t pleased that the club didn’t mark the occasions with a cake last year.
And with the Ivory Coast international’s agent saying this week that he is 90% certain to leave the club, City’s owners might want to throw in a party bag as well as a cake.
It looks like Pellegrini knows that any birthday-related mishap this year could cost him one of his star players and he has likely already reached out informally to various Mancunian bakeries.
“Are you sure it is his birthday next week? We will have to see what the best thing to do is because I think it is important to learn from your mistakes in the past.” Pellegrini joked in quotes reported by the Telegraph.
Maybe the best course of action would be to bring in a chef from outside the club, and assemble an array of ingredients and baking paraphernalia on a counter for Toure to make his own dish in some sort of wacky and whimsical team building exercise.
However, this may be construed by Toure as yet another slight, and could drive him further into the clutches of PSG.
There are a myriad of issues for Pellegrini to consider and this sort of situation is exactly what being a manager at the top level is all about. Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho probably deal with it two or three times a year.
Even when on the bench he didn’t get game time. The coach doesn’t like or trust him. Saturday once again showed just how wrong O’connor has been all season
O’Connor is just all wrong for Leinster.
He has a very big chance next season with Leinster during the World Cup, midfield won’t be as competitive so he should get a good run of matches.
Mark if Darcy doesn’t make the World Cup squad, he’ll play 12 with t’eo at 13. Then Madigan and sexton will be back so the midfield won’t be as easy to get into as you may think
That pop pass from O’Brien
Battle between him and Madigan for the 12 jersey next season.
It’s always to easy to see who coaches ‘just like/don’t like’. When Gopperth played badly it was ignored whereas when Madigan played mediocre or even if Reid played well decisions went against them.
It creates such a poisonous culture as some players start to feel entitled to spots and others feel it doesn’t matter how well they play they won’t get picked. Cody and Fergusson were masters at disregarding players identities and judging on match performance alone. MOC is such a stink manager.