what the papers say

Focus on the manager

Lots of attention on today's game against Spurs in the Sundays.

Mail on Sunday

"Manchester City boss Mark Hughes faces the board ahead of Spurs clash"

Manager Mark Hughes has been called to a board meeting by Manchester City chairman Khaldoon al Mubarak this morning, just hours before their crunch game with Tottenham.

While Hughes will try to concentrate on discussing the players he wants to sign in January, he can also expect to be asked why City have won just one of their last six Premier League games despite some heavy summer investment in the club, including the record-breaking £32million signing of Robinho.

Hughes insisted last night he is not going into the first board meeting of the season under pressure and will fly to the Middle East with executive chairman Garry Cook to meet owner, Abu Dhabi's Sheikh Mansour, for the first time on Wednesday.

The City manager, who has targeted a modest top-seven finish this season, hopes to make up to three signings in the January transfer window - a left-back, defensive midfield player and striker.

He said: 'We added good quality in the summer and we need to add more. That is acknowledged.

'The owners give people resources that are needed for them to be successful. That is how they run all their businesses. We finished eighth last season and want to do better than that, but we can't go from a mid-table team into the top four overnight. Nobody is immune from results, but I don't know how many more times I have to say I'm not under any pressure.'

Sunday Times

"Mark Hughes aims to sink Spurs and prove he’s on track"

Our goal is very simple – to make Manchester City the biggest club in the Premier League and, to begin with, to finish in the top four this season.” Dr Sulaiman Al Fahim, of the Abu Dhabi United Group, September 1, 2008.

SIX defeats in the first 11 matches, one point adrift of Stoke and Middlesbrough, and behind Hull is not quite what the good doctor ordered in his mission statement after City’s Arab takeover. Mark Hughes could do with a boost at home to Harry Redknapp’s revitalised Tottenham this afternoon, when a board meeting is scheduled to discuss progress to date. Both teams had favourable results in the Uefa Cup last Thursday but Hughes’s defence, leaking two goals a game, continues to give cause for concern.

Throwing money at a club, however, is rarely an instant fix and it remains to be seen whether Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the owner Hughes is about to meet for the first time, is as patient as he is prosperous. The sheikh will not be in attendance today (he has yet to grace English football with his presence). Instead, his Welsh manager has been granted an audience in Abu Dhabi in midweek. Hughes has already presented his wish-list for January but accepts that City may have to wait to spend the £100m-plus that is readily available.

Whether Hughes will be the one who gets to spend it, only time will tell. The party line, trotted out again on Friday, is that City are “a work in progress” but it has been noted by the board, and the fans, that development has hardly been bat-out-of-hell. Since thrashing Portsmouth 6-0 towards the end of September, the past nine games in league and cup have brought three wins and four defeats, and Hughes now admits: “We won’t finish in the top four this season.”

Given that he is City’s 12th manager in 20 years, and their fourth in four, after Kevin Keegan, Stuart Pearce and Sven-Göran Eriksson, he is all too aware of the realities, saying: “I’m not immune to the results-driven pressures.” Against this background, the points would be particularly welcome this afternoon. Hughes knows they will be hard to come by against opponents who are bottom of the table again but in resurgent form after three wins and a draw in Redknapp’s first four games. Asked to comment on the Spurs transformation, Hughes said: “When foreign managers get the top jobs they are likely to be successful because they get the best players to work with, but when they’re appointed by teams outside the top four, sometimes they are not so successful, and my view is that British managers are the better option. We know what we’re doing, and we have experience of the Premier League. People call Harry old school, but I don’t go along with that. To stay in the game as long as he has, he has had to develop with the times.”

Is it a bad time to be playing Spurs? “I don’t know about that,” he said. “At home, we’ll cause problems for any team. We score a lot of goals here [16 in their last five matches]. We concede a few as well, mind. We need to find a better balance in that respect.”

Juande Ramos was given less than a year by the Tottenham board, but Hughes was confident he had longer. “We have got our first board meeting on Sunday but everybody seems to be very calm about the situation,” he said. “There’s an acknowledgment that it’s a long-term project. We’re not a top four team at the moment, everybody can see that, but what we do have is a good attacking threat. The owners are realistic, they’re not here for short-term gain. They expect to be successful in the end, of course.”

Nevertheless, they had targeted the top four this season, not six defeats in those first 11 games. “Away defeats are hard to take but our home form is good,” Hughes shot back. “We haven’t gone from a team that struggled from January to the end of last season to one that’s going to challenge for the top four, that’s an impossibility. We have added quality to the side [Robinho, Jo, Shaun Wright-Phillips, Vincent Kompany and Tal Ben Haim], now we need to add more, and that will happen. Meanwhile, we’re trying to stay steady and focused, maintain our attacking threat and get stronger as we go on, the reverse of last year.”

The hope was that reinforcements would be available in January. “I’ve got players I’d like to bring here then,” Hughes said. He refused to be specific but three of his old Blackburn team – Stephen Warnock, Christopher Samba and Roque Santa Cruz – are known to be among them. The owners seemed to be more interested in marquee names, and had spoken of Cristiano Ronaldo, Ronaldinho and Kaka. Was there a conflict between board and manager, with Hughes wanting grafters to reduce that goals against column and his employers preferring to reach for the A-list stars? “Not really,” he said, sounding less than convincing. “You don’t get in the Champions League and win trophies without top players.”

Reports that Luiz Felipe Scolari had renewed interest in Robinho drew a smile. “He has signed a long-term contract here and this is where he’ll stay,” Hughes said.

How Redknapp changed his luck

Since Manchester City beat Portsmouth 6-0 in September, Mark Hughes has won only one game in the Premier League, losing four and drawing one. Harry Redknapp, on the other hand, has embarked on a rich vein of form since Portsmouth were thrashed at Eastlands, Redknapp’s last league defeat as Pompey boss

He is undefeated since that setback, winning four of his past six Premier League games, including two apiece with Pompey and Spurs, picking up 2.33 points per game as opposed to only 0.67 Pts per game for Hughes. Spurs have scored eight goals in three games since Redknapp’s appointment, as opposed to only five in Tottenham’s first eight games of the season under Juande Ramos