The breaking news late on Monday night was of course the news that many Manchester United fans had been expecting, that Carlos Tevez has admitted that he wants to leave our ‘Noisy Neighbours’ Manchester City.
Tevez of course has had an ‘interesting’ time in England and during his five year stay has scored 69 Premier League goals for West Ham, City and United of course where he had a two year stay before moving across to our city-rivals in 2009.
Tevez has cited ‘family reasons’ for wanting to leave City and throughout his time in England he has spoke plenty of times about missing his family especially his children back home in Argentina.
Whilst given his background, there are no problems with understanding that fact, if he was missing his family that much, it does beggar the question: Why if he was missing them didn’t he leave City sooner?
We can only speculate on that. Did money persuade him to stay at City for another season or was it the challenge of getting them into the Champions League or winning silverware.
Was it down to money that stopped Sir Alex Ferguson signing him permanently in 2009 and even so was his heart really set on staying at us. I don’t know.
What no-one can argue with is that when he’s on-form he is a player that most of the top sides in Europe will want. At times last season he carried City in games and whilst he may have played second fiddle to Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney for the majority of his United career he still scored some important goals for us.
Thinking of the timing of this announcement, it’s quite clear that Tevez wanted this public before the Copa America was over and it’s quite clever on his part that he’s made the announcement during the tournament.
By that it probably means that he won’t have to return to City to resume training, which means that (and this will please him) he won’t have to set foot in the city again.
It shall be very interesting to see how soon after the tournament Tevez finds a new club, as City will want to recoup as much money as they can for him. You suspect clubs will have to pay at least £30-40million to buy him and only a few clubs in the world can afford that.
Whoever he goes to will be getting a good player, though if he does go and play in Italy/Spain – which most pundits expect – there will always be that slight doubt in the chairman/manager’s mind that they are signing a player who is homesick, which is a clear problem to have.
Looking back at Tevez’s time at us, in a way I am pleased that he left us two seasons ago as it’s very easy to imagine that we might not have signed Javier Hernandez as a result of his departure.
Chicharito is just as good a player as our former no.32 and unlike Tevez wants to play in England and has spoken numerous times in his debut season that he wants to stay at us for a long time.
Of course you can never predict what can happen in football but Chicharito comes across as an honest level-headed player who loves life in England and someone who we can build our future around.
He has the talent to be one of the best goal-poachers, ‘fox in the box’ forwards (call it what you will) in the Premier League for the best part of a decade. Even despite his success last year which saw him score 20 goals, the scary part about our little Mexican is that he’s going to get better which will frighten the life out of defenders across the world.
So when you put that in mind. It could be argued that Sir Alex did find a replacement for Tevez albeit a year after his acrimonious departure.
It shall be interesting to see how the Neighbours get on finding a replacement for him as you can guarantee that they will not manage to buy a highly-talented youngster like we did in Chicharito at such a bargain price.
By Adam Dennehey – @ADennehey87
