Gary Neville, the Manchester United captain, has risked a backlash from Carlos T?vez in the Carling Cup semi-final first leg this evening by declaring that the Manchester City forward’s financial demands made it impossible for him to stay at Old Trafford.
T?vez has been in excellent form in recent weeks, scoring 11 goals in his past ten matches and provoking much debate about whether United had erred dramatically in letting him join City. The debate led one United supporter to ask Neville, in a question-and-answer session with a newspaper in Malta, whether Sir Alex Ferguson had made a mistake in allowing T?vez to join City — to which Neville candidly replied with reference to his former team-mate’s requests.
“The manager over the years has made many decisions with regard to players coming and going and he has almost always been proved correct,” Neville said. “Over a period of 20 years he may have got one or two wrong, and I think he has admitted that himself, but he knows exactly what he’s doing and he understands when a player’s time is up.
“I can’t disagree with his decision on T?vez. He was a good player for us, but if the financial demands are too big then that’s just the way it goes. Other good players have left this club in the past. It’s not the first time it’s happened.”
United are mistaken, though, when they claim, as Ferguson has done frequently since last summer, that T?vez left Old Trafford purely out of financial considerations. The Argentina forward decided to depart in March last year, partly out of his discontent at repeatedly being left out in favour of Dimitar Berbatov for the biggest games and partly because he and the owners of his “economic rights” were unhappy at the time United took before serious negotiations began over a new long-term contract.
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Ferguson claimed in the summer that T?vez was overpriced at £25 million, but United pointedly announced in June that they had offered the player’s owners £25.5 million in a bid to retain his services. As The Times revealed in September, the eventual cost of the deal to take him to City was far greater, but the reality is that, by the time talks with United broke down, the 25-year-old was so disenfranchised at Old Trafford that he was prepared to consider joining Liverpool or Chelsea, as well as City.
To judge from his previous declarations on the matter, T?vez will not hold back if he scores this evening. He said in September, before the Barclays Premier League fixture at Old Trafford, that he would not celebrate any goal he scored against his former club out of respect to their fans. He did not get the opportunity to exercise such restraint on that occasion, when United won 4-3, but he stated afterwards that his hostile reception from the home crowd had prompted a rethink for future games.
T?vez is certain to be the focal point of City’s attack this evening, but Roberto Mancini, the City manager, has a decision to make over Robinho, the unsettled Brazil forward, who played so poorly after coming on as a substitute against Everton on Saturday that he was later replaced himself.
Dennis Tueart, the man who scored the deciding goal when City last won a leading trophy, in the 1976 League Cup final, believes that the club should give up on their £34.2 million British record acquisition from Real Madrid. “I think it’s about time he moved on,” Tueart, who also served City as a director until 2007, said. “I don’t think he has settled in well. Mancini will have seen what mental state he is in and will have seen his attitude and his approach to his training. All Saturday’s performance will have done is confirm in Mancini’s mind what the situation is with Robinho.”