GettyImagesMario Balotelli: Moments of brilliance and moments of madness

It is a fair bet that Pablo Zabaleta doesn't do multi-coloured chicken hats, nocturnal female penitentiary visits nor does he produce lively domestic firework displays from his upstairs bathroom window. By avoiding some of these elements and improving markedly year on year since his 2008 arrival at the Etihad, Zabaleta has become a firm crowd favourite. The owner of the outrageous hat is also a terrace icon at City, but the winds of change suggest something different might be floating in the air over Manchester 11 for Mario Barwuah Balotelli.

- Dzeko to stay and fight for his place

When the home crowd devotes its time to producing a song about you, you know you have arrived in the hearts of the City faithful. Both Zabaleta and Balotelli have been honoured in this way but the respective lyrics of these ditties make for an interesting comparison. The utilitarian de de der Pablo Zabaleta does what it says on the tin, simple, effective, repetitive, but the ode to Balotelli - like the man himself - covers much more than simply football:

OOOOOOO Balotelli,
He's a striker,
He's good at darts,
An allergy to grass but when he plays he's +!#+* class,
He drives around Moss Side with a wallet full of cash (repeat until you are hoarse)

The Boy Balotelli, the obvious polar opposite in the City squad to the quiet unassuming Zabaleta, is at 22-years-old a breaking news story on legs, the logical development of where modern football has landed us, indeed where the modern world has landed us, a bit of a lad that folk lambast and ridicule in equal amounts. The lad who when stopped by the police and found to be carrying £15,000 in cash in his back pocket explained it thus: "I'm rich." The man who throws darts out of upstairs windows at youth team players when he is bored. The man who gives lump sums to tramps when he feels like it. Apocryphal, spurious tales some of these may be, but the point is clear: here lives a strange and exotic beast for the grey wet streets of Manchester.

We are often told that Balotelli needs an arm around his shoulder, a word of calm advice, a quiet corner away from the glare of publicity, but he seems to need this every day of his life - as some people do - and he does not get it every day. Football folk, hardened and selfish, do not have the time and patience for this touchy-feely claptrap every day of the week. They have training to take, interviews to give and Playstations to twiddle with. Balotelli, meanwhile, wanders off into the next nightclub, lap-dancing bar or press conference and the cameras begin to blink again.

Think about being 22 for a minute. Then add millionaire status. A frivolous cocktail, if ever there was one. Now take away parental advice, familial stability and sense of home. Throw in racism from some of those that pay to watch you exercise your craft, the influence of agents and hangers-on, plus all-pervading media intrusion. Money, fame and a public private life may seem like a heady mix at first, but soon - as many stars of this great sport of ours have discovered - it turns around and bites you square on the backside. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide and every time you walk out of the door, you are accompanied by the ever-present popping of flashbulbs.

Mario Balotelli sells newspapers, fills webspace and turns heads. It is fashionable to both "love his idiosyncratic ways" and "lambast his idiotic selfishness". A massive bubbling vortex of dirty water swirls around his every move. He is the catalyst of a thousand heated debates on the airwaves and in pubs. He is a loon, a loner and a loose cannon. He cannot be allowed to go on like this. He cannot get away with that. He should be locked up for the other.

We are all aware of the ability to produce sublime moments on the football pitch and, in the flash of an eye, sublimely ridiculous ones off it. There is no need to list all his stand-out moments in a sky blue shirt here, but there have been many and he can count amongst them a Man of the Match display at Wembley in City's first FA Cup final win in 35 years and a brace at Old Trafford in that most stunning of Manchester derbies. He is clearly a man for the big occasion, as his crucial penalty in the last minute 3-2 defeat of Spurs last season reflects, but the same game saw an ugly incident with Scott Parker and four other red cards have floated unnecessarily in front of the Italian's face in his time at City. As Italian football expert James Horncastle suggests, "It seems clubs can't live with him or without him."

He has seemingly also perfected an odd way of making good whatever his destructive character has diminished in the first place. When a squabble broke out over who should take a free-kick against Sunderland in the title run-in last season (which mirrored perfectly a similar incident in an Inter game when he obstructed designated penalty taker Samuel Eto'o from taking his run up against Palermo, because it had been he, Balotelli, who had been fouled for the award in the first place) Balotelli was made to look like a small boy in danger of losing his sense of reasoning. Growing bored with a succession of Kolarov freekicks that had hit the North Stand roof, Balotelli seemed to suddenly be gripped by the notion that it was his turn for a slice of the action. With time slipping away and City needing to score rapidly and more than once to gain an unlikely but vital point, the only thing on Balotelli's mind as the mists swept down over his eyes, was that he had been wronged and he should make a stand. In any circumstances comical, in these absurdly so.

Many feel the Premier League is no place for this kind of post pubescent delinquent tantrum. As Martin Samuel stated this week in The Mail: "Balotelli wants to operate beyond the strictures of the team ethic...the cost of this is beginning to outweigh the benefit." Sandro Mazzola, that great old man of Italian football talks of "making a leap of quality" in a footballer's maturity, but this in reference to Mirko Vucinic of Juventus, who has reached the ripe old age of 28. A slight wait, it seems, may be on the cards for those of us watching Balotelli's stuttering progress.

Paul Sarahs, a London-based Blues fan who is a football commentator, carried out an informal internet trawl of fans' opinions through Twitter and was surprised by the response: "The majority, it seems, are out of patience and ready to see him move on if we get a bid of €25m+." he states. "I agree. Time to cut our losses."

But in a flash of brilliance, with a swipe of that nonchalant right foot, Balotelli produces something akin to the football crown jewels, an ornate decoration that turns the head, turns the tide and turns the game. His is the kind of magic that can be used to end all arguments. The last minute penalty. The goal knocked in with the shoulder, the 95th minute set-up in the final game of the season to win the title for the first time in 44 years? No problem, sir. Sign on the dotted line, just....here!

But his is the wonky temperament that you cannot leave alone for a second. The pan of milk going over the sides and down onto the stove. The sloping shoulders, the dough eyes of the scolded puppy, the toothy grin of the kid in the sweetshop. And herein lies the conundrum. What to do with the boy who refuses to toe the line, who refuses to grow up, who refuses to play the team role?

In Mancini, Balotelli has one of the few trainers at the top level, who can really see into the great dark void inside. It is public knowledge that Mancini thought highly of himself as a player, sometimes more highly than his coaches and had already worked a serious superiority complex by the time he switched from Bologna to Sampdoria, where he would enjoy 424 sumptuously decorative games for the Blucerchiati. Let us not forget that the extremely volatile youth that was Mancini picked fist fights with Trevor Francis and Liam Brady, two of the English league's more docile exports to Serie A.

Juan Sebastian Veron tells the tale of getting back to the dressing room to find Mancini stripped to the waist ready for a fist fight with him too, after some moment of perceived betrayal had taken a grip on the young Italian. It takes a special kind of kindred spirit to recognise the potential for this kind of volatility in a fellow professional and, in Mancini's indulgence of Balotelli, he is no doubt attempting to harness it for the good of Manchester City. For, make no mistake, harnessing talent like this with group benefit in mind - and nothing else will serve in modern football - is as easy as nailing custard to the wall.

Mario Balotelli is clearly not the first young player from Italy with a penchant for fireworks. Neither is he in the worst place on the planet, if he wishes to be at least partially understood and accepted for what he is: a fine footballer with the potential to go much higher. But time may be beginning to run out for Balotelli and, at some point in the not too distant future, even his greatest supporter may feel it is time to ask for new cards.

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