Mario Balotelli. Everyone has an opinion. He has been the centre of attention for the press corps for some time now, what with the hat, the car, the girl, the bathroom, the female penitentiary, the red cards and, very occasionally, the football.

- Bennett: Mario v. Mancini
- 'Balotelli in Mancini bust-up'

Now, two and half long days into 2013, he features once again and once again it has little to do with football. City's training grounds at Carrington have long been a place of delight for the professional snappers attached to the big national dailies in the UK. It is an open expanse of grass pitches near to the motorway, offering various vantage points for anyone with the slightest of zoom lenses to catch whatever "action" transpires.

City fans have long grown tired of the Daily Mail's picture specials featuring the type of training ground coming togethers that happen all around the world where testosterone, egos and sportsmen are pitched together. Hardly a month seems to drift by without this particular organ printing some bust-up or other to introduce the lip-smacking idea that City's mercenaries are all at each other's throats. Long have we all hoped that the powers that be would have the brainwave of planting a row of fast-growing Scots Pines to end our public embarrassment.

Mario Balotelli is often the centrepiece of such collages and on Thursday he was there again. Only this time it is a little different. The throat he has his muscular hands around this time is not Micah Richards or Yaya, or Jerome Boateng (all of whom he has been snapped holding off the ground) but that of manager Roberto Mancini. This time it really is fireworks and not of the bathroom variety. City fans have given Balotelli about as much slack as it is possible to give a player, but it is difficult to imagine another walk of life where you can get away with having a scrap with your boss. I can't remember doing it and I am sure none of you can. True Mancini's man management style does not come with a cuddle and a share of the fruit pastilles, but physical assault is not on the menu either.

Only last week Mancini told the press that Balotelli would be going nowhere during the transfer window. Sheik Mansour loves him too much, we were told. He brings a global audience to City, we were told. Whilst this is strictly true, a good 70% of this global attention comes for what might loosely be termed the player's extra-curricular activities. This, one can be reasonably sure, is not the kind of global attention that the good Sheik was thinking about.

The bottom line, however, is this: football is a fierce passionate sport and top squads are packed with men whose whole instinct is to be competitors. You cannot have a team full of winners and expect them to have the characters of guinea pigs. As any football watcher will tell you, this kind of stuff is not wholly unusual. In fact it is more the norm than an exception.

However, there are only two options open to Mancini now: Mario Balotelli will appear on one of two lists on Friday morning. It will either be the transfer list or the team-sheet for Watford in the FA Cup and I wouldn't like to bet on which it will be.

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