‘Why Always Me?’ 10 years on: The fireworks, the 6-1 and the madness of Mario Balotelli
Daniel Taylor 4h ago 17
Amid the rolling countryside of rural Cheshire, the village of Mottram St Andrew belongs to a footballers’ enclave known locally as the “Golden Triangle”.
Prestbury, the neighbouring village, was once calculated to have the highest number of millionaires per head in the country. Wilmslow, a couple of miles in the other direction, is another place for the people who could be described as the haves and the have-yachts.
Nowhere, though, is showier than Alderley Edge, where car enthusiasts gather every weekend to take pictures of the souped-up Ferraris and Lamborghinis that roar up and down the high street.
Mottram is less ostentatious. Horses graze in the fields. There is a bridge club and a branch of the Women’s Institute. It is quieter, sleepier, with a hand-made sign on Oak Road asking motorists not to beep their horns on the corner where it is impossible to see what is coming the other way.
Then, on the night of October 21, 2011, the peace was shattered.
“Four breathing apparatus and two water jets were used to deal with the fire,” said a statement from the fire service. “Crews managed to put out the fire within half an hour of arriving but remained at the scene until 2.45am to prevent any possible flare-ups. Smoke alarms were fitted at the property and the occupiers were able to get out unharmed. The fire was caused by a firework.”
A firework, to be specific, that had been let off in a metal bin during a show of pyrotechnics from the window of a first-floor bathroom.
When the fire crews arrived, they did not realise at first that the man who had arranged this fireworks party was — to use Noel Gallagher’s description — the “poster boy for naughty children”.
Soon, though, it all became clear. Mario Balotelli was in the garden and, according to various accounts, there was one point when he ran back into the house to retrieve a Louis Vuitton suitcase and as much money as he could carry.
Why would Balotelli keep so much cash lying around? Well, that was a story in itself. The truth was he liked to have wads of banknotes spilling out of a safe, door ajar, because he had seen it in an old movie and thought it would impress the string of girlfriends who became attached to him.
Now there were two fire engines outside his house, with their lights flashing, and the police had been called as back-up.
It was the kind of scene that came to encapsulate Balotelli’s time in Manchester and could probably be described only one way: bedlam.
Yet the fireworks were only part of that story — 10 years ago today — from a 48-hour period that signified a changing of the guard in the modern rivalry of Manchester City and Manchester United.
It was the weekend that, a decade on, is now known in Manchester as simply “the 6-1”.
For City, it was perhaps the moment when they realised nothing could stop them becoming the force of English football. For Sir Alex Ferguson, it was the heaviest defeat of his quarter of a century as manager at Old Trafford. “Our worst-ever day,” he called it.
And for the residents of Oak Road in Mottram St Andrew, it was their own experience of what Ferguson called the “Noisy Neighbours”.
Mark Hughes, the former City manager, lived in the house next to Balotelli. Michael Carrick had another of the imposing properties behind high walls, metal gates and security signs. Peter Crouch was among the other footballers who settled here. The cricketer Andrew Flintoff, too.
Hughes was out Christmas shopping a few weeks later when he bumped into one of the journalists from the Manchester patch — and it didn’t sound like Balotelli should expect an invitation to the next dinner party.
“You couldn’t ask for a better neighbour,” Hughes volunteered, with a look on his face that made it clear he didn’t mean a single word.
The morning after the night before.
The biggest match of the season was coming up and the headlines were all about Balotelli’s house — or, rather, the house he was renting — being accidentally set on fire during a fireworks display in the bathroom.
Balotelli had spent the night, or what was left of it, at the Radisson hotel in Manchester and when he clocked in for 10am training he might have expected a rocket of another nature.
Roberto Mancini, the City manager, was waiting for him. Their relationship was always close, but often tempestuous, and it did not help Balotelli’s cause that he had declared earlier in the week he was a changed man and that the “real Mario” had moved to the countryside for a quieter life.
Mancini and Balotelli had a good relationship (Photo: Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images)
“With Mario,” says one former member of Mancini’s backroom staff, “the bollockings all tended to roll into one.”
Mancini, however, kept him in the team for the trip to Old Trafford. Balotelli had scored in each of his previous four games. And the player who was once described by Jose Mourinho as “unmanageable” had a plan.
First, though, he had to let Les Chapman, City’s kit man, into the secret.
“Mario pulled me to one side and said he wanted me to print something on his compression shirt for the game,” says Chapman.
“I said, ‘Well, we can’t print anything controversial and we can’t print anything that’s going to be offensive to the United fans or anybody’. He thought for a minute or two. Then he came out with one or two things. I said, ‘No, Mario, no, I don’t think that’s appropriate’. And then he came out with it: ‘Why Always Me?’. As soon as he said it, I knew that was the one.”
Chapman, or “Chappy”, had the trust of City’s players. He was a brilliant keeper of secrets, as all the best kit men tend to be, and Balotelli wanted it to be a surprise for everyone.
“Nobody knew he had that shirt,” Sergio Aguero confirms in his autobiography. “Later, when I looked at the ‘Why Always Me?’ message on the front, I told Mario that if he was calmer and didn’t do so many things, it probably wouldn’t always be him. If we’d known he had it on, we’d have told him to take it off.”
Whether Balotelli would have listened is another matter. And his moment arrived, midway through the first half, when the ball came to him inside the penalty area, directly in front of the Stretford End. His shot was stroked into the far corner, precise and pure. Balotelli lifted his shirt above his head to reveal his message, then stared ahead of himself, simmering in his own brilliance.
The pictures flashed around the world. It was a peacock-like spreading of Balotelli’s feathers — reminiscent, in some ways, of Eric Cantona’s famous pose after chipping in a goal at the opposite end 15 years earlier — and it was difficult throughout the remainder of the match not to recall Ferguson’s “not in my lifetime” response to the question of whether City would ever be the top team in Manchester.
Two minutes into the second half, Jonny Evans was sent off for pulling down Balotelli and City, with the extra man, were unforgiving opponents. Balotelli scored again. Edin Dzeko got a double, Aguero and David Silva one apiece. “Why Always Them?” City’s fans had complained about United for generations. Not any more.
“The second half seemed to run like a film script, at a venue where only shame and disaster had come our way for the previous half-century,” says Simon Curtis, the City fan, writer and author whose book, City in Europe, is released next year. “It was a day nobody thought would come, the end of empires, the changing of the guard and Alex Ferguson’s look of dread that he would have to be in a press conference to talk about it all in a matter of minutes. ‘Not in my lifetime’ was happening just 14 months after he had issued his surly quote.”
Balotelli, 6-1
(Photo: Matthew Peters/Manchester United via Getty Images)
It was the first time United had conceded six on their ground since 1930, the heaviest defeat of Ferguson’s managerial career and the biggest ever margin of victory in a Manchester derby, and it did not particularly matter that Balotelli was shown a yellow card for his big reveal.
Chapman remembers it, though. “The problem was, he lifted his shirt above his head. In the eyes of the referee, that’s not correct. So he got booked. If he had lifted it just to his chin, it would have been fine. I did tell Mario before the game to lift it chin-high and not above his head. But, of course, Mario being Mario…”
The saddest thing, perhaps, is that Balotelli tends to be remembered more for what he did off the pitch than on it. He never truly became the footballer he ought to have been and is now, at the age of 31, with Adana Demirspor, who are 10th in this season’s Turkish Super Lig.
With Balotelli, however, there were always mitigating factors. His childhood, having been born in Sicily to Ghanaian parents, was a difficult one and involved him being put into foster care at the age of three. He had to endure racism throughout his early years, growing up with an adoptive family in Brescia, northern Italy, and those were experiences that shaped his personality.
When Mancini took his seat in the media centre at Old Trafford, directly after the 6-1, he talked about a player who had stayed too young for too long. But he didn’t sound angry. How could he be after such a seismic victory?
“It’s Mario,” Mancini said. “He’s crazy. But I love him because he’s a good guy. I don’t know what happened with the fireworks. The good thing is he was not hurt. But all I know is that he is sleeping at a hotel now.”
Mancini talked about his conviction that Balotelli could be among the top five players in the world. He reiterated his belief that, if the striker knuckled down, he had enough talent to be on the same level as Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.
The journalists in his company had heard him say this before. We had also heard him offer to let Balotelli move in with his own family if it meant keeping him out of trouble. After a few moments of deliberation, Mancini’s verdict was that he “would keep him in the cellar”.
Ultimately, though, Mancini came to realise that maybe Mourinho was correct and there was no future with a footballer who could not be relied upon to play with adult intelligence.
As Mario Sconcerti, the Italian football journalist, wrote in Corriere della Sera — under the headline of “The (Failed) Fable of Balotelli” — the player in question “had an unusual talent for making people happy when he arrives and even happier when he leaves”.
(Photo: Alessandro Sabattini/Getty Images)
Who could argue with Luigi Garlando in La Gazzetta dello Sport when he wrote that Balotelli was “condemned to chase a rainbow he will never reach. He is Ulysses without Ithaca. The suspicion is that he will always be known as an errant striker”.
Balotelli never lived up to Mancini’s expectations and eventually moved to Milan for £5 million less than City had paid to sign him. His career began to drift and when he returned to the Premier League with Liverpool that phase of his career is probably best summed up by the title of the relevant chapter — “Flop” — in Luca Caioli’s biography of the player.
As for the “Why Always Me?” shirt, Noel Gallagher made a bid for that when the singer interviewed Balotelli for BBC’s Football Focus.
The only proper interview Balotelli gave during his time in Manchester was, in Gallagher’s words, “as big as Frost-Nixon”. Gallagher asked if he could keep the shirt as a souvenir — and Mario, looking slightly bemused, agreed.
Other revelations included that, yes, it was true that the player’s adoptive mother, Silvia, once sent him to the John Lewis department store to buy an iron and he returned instead with a quad bike and a trampoline. And, yes, it was true that on another shopping expedition to Manchester’s Trafford Centre, he was so spellbound by a magician he paid for him to visit his house and teach him his tricks. Balotelli, you came to realise, was just a big kid.
What was largely unknown at the time — revealed later in Ferguson’s 2015 book Leading — was that United’s manager “briefly flirted” with the idea of taking on City for Balotelli’s signature from Internazionale in 2010. “I did my homework on him, speaking to a few Italian agents,” Ferguson wrote. “The feedback I got confirmed it was too big a risk.”
Yet the good, for City, did outweigh the bad, even if it was a close-run thing sometimes.
“Mario went straight to the hearts of the City faithful,” says Curtis. “Not only because of what was on the front of his shirt, but also because he was the modern reincarnation of Tony Coleman, Stan Bowles and Rodney Marsh — rascals, rogues and rotters from the previous great City era of 1968 to 1972.”
Not that all the stories about Balotelli were based on fact.
It was never true that he drove through Manchester in a Santa outfit, handing out £50 notes from his car window to the homeless. He didn’t walk into Salford’s pubs to challenge the locals to games of pool. He didn’t ride a unicorn.
But there was enough previous — chucking darts at youth-team players, the prangs in his car, the training-ground scrap with Mancini and on and on — for him to be pushing his luck if “Why Always Me?” was partly a message that he felt unfairly maligned.
Aguero remembers one occasion at City’s training ground.
“We were having breakfast at Carrington and Mario was reading a newspaper that had a big picture of him in the ‘Why Always Me?’ shirt.
“Alongside, it had numerous reasons why it was always him: girls, smoking, police, red cards, parking fines, fireworks; it was endless. He’d say, ‘Nah, I never did that,’ and I would say, ‘But there’s a picture proving you did’. I loved Mario — everyone loved Mario, though he drove us nuts at times.”
Balotelli’s excuse for the fireworks was that one of his friends caused the blaze. A towel had caught on fire. Then the curtains ignited and soon the entire floor was gutted by smoke. Bonfire Night was just around the corner and, whoever was to blame, it presented City in a bad light until the club’s media department came up with a piece of PR mastery.
Somebody at City had a contact in the Greater Manchester fire service. It was a damage-limitation exercise. A photoshoot was hastily arranged and suddenly Balotelli was holding up a leaflet as Manchester’s newly appointed, and most unlikely, ambassador for fireworks safety.
“I remember getting the brief from the club and asking, ‘Is he in the right frame of mind to do this?’,” says Sharon Latham, the club’s photographer at the time. “The answer was, ‘Umm… who knows what frame of mind he will be in?’.”
She is laughing as she tells this story. “I waited for Mario and told him I needed to get a photograph. ‘What is this, Sharon?’. I took him on to the steps of Carrington, overlooking the training fields, and said, ‘OK, Mario, you need to stand here and hold this’. I gave him the leaflet, explained what it was and he said, ‘Huh!’. I knew I needed to be quick. ‘Hold it up, hold it up!’. I literally took two frames and that was it. Thank you!”
Latham was such a popular figure with Mancini’s title-winning players that, five years since leaving the club, she is still in touch with many of them — Balotelli included.
“The last time I saw him was Vincent Kompany’s testimonial,” she says. “He was in fine fettle, still as much fun as ever. I never had any problems with Mario. He was so lovely, such a big character.”
And this, ultimately, is part of a wider pattern: you will never find anybody at City with a bad word to say about the man at the centre of this story.
“I was sorry to see Mario leave because I thought the world of him,” Aguero wrote in his 2015 book. “I’m happy that we are still regularly in touch. I was injured when we were playing Barcelona at home in the Champions League (in 2014) and watching from the stand when my phone went off.
“I didn’t recognise the number but I answered it anyway and heard, ‘Hey! It’s Mario! How’s it going, dickhead? Come on City, come on City!’. And then he just hung up.”
