You know there’s something wrong with football when Roberto Mancini can take the moral high ground without the rest of the world keeling over in fits of laughter.

But that’s how crazy things are over at Manchester City. A manager who spends a few hundred million pounds on players and still complains about not having enough midfielders – while the rest of the world stares at a financial crisis – is a veritable saint compared to the wretch that is Carlos Tevez.

“In the middle I didn’t have any players because we have James Milner and Nigel de Jong out injured,” Mancini said a couple of weeks ago, conveniently ignoring the fact that Yaya Toure, David Silva, Samir Nasri, Gareth Barry and Owen Hargreaves could form their own boyband of midfielders.

Toure could be the tall, buff one who only pretends to sing while performing some overdramatic dance moves, and Silva could be the shorter, more boyish looking one who constantly stares longingly into the camera while clutching his heart. Nasri, of course, would be the token bad boy.

But I digress. I’m just way too excited about Westlife coming to Malaysia. Oh, the memories…

Incidentally, did you know that Westlife’s Nicky Byrne (the shorter, more boyish looking one who constantly stares longingly into the camera while clutching his heart) was a former professional goalkeeper, and was in Leeds United’s 1997 FA Youth Cup winning squad? 

I digress again. The point I was about to make about Carlos Tevez was that it takes someone quite absurdly rotten to make Mancini and his City slickers look good. And this is a team that has pathological idiot Mario Balotelli in it. 

Yet Tevez has managed to achieve that with two simple words – “¿por qué?”, everybody’s favourite telenovela phrase (translation – “why”). Fitting, considering the soap opera standards of City’s season so far. 

According to newspapers who bothered enough to get lip readers, that’s what Tevez said when he “allegedly” refused to come on as a substitute against Bayern Munich during their Champions League tie. 

That was enough for Mancini to get all high and mighty at the post-match press conference, proudly declaring that Tevez would never play for City again, inadvertently making himself the leader of the lynch mob that has been calling for Tevez’s head ever since. You know, for the good of the game. 

That mob included managers like Mick McCarthy, whose sagely wisdom we all so crave for. 

He weighed in on the debate with his usual arrogance – you know, since he’s the boss of the mighty Wolverhamptom Wanderers – saying if he were Tevez’s manager, he would’ve left the player on the tarmac in Munich because he’s “bad for the game globally”. 

Sadly, a manager like him will never get to a position to manage a world class player like Tevez. 

But wretched and rotten as he is, if you asked me, I think Tevez is hardly the problem with the football. 

Yes, Tevez has been trouble from the minute he stepped off that plane in London. He was trouble for West Ham United (£5.5million worth of trouble thanks to that record fine for his illegal transfer to the club), he was trouble for Manchester United (refusing to stay at the club beyond his two-year loan spell because Alex Ferguson had “disrespected” him) and now he’s trouble for Manchester City. 

He hasn’t bothered to learn English (who knew who he couldn’t even say “why”?), he has complained endlessly about life in England, and he continues to act like a petulant child while receiving the kind of money in a month that I probably wouldn’t do in my lifetime. 

So, why would I defend him, especially considering how much I have loathed him ever since he left United? 

Take a look at the headlines from this weekend’s Premier League action. Arsenal fans, supposedly well-educated Londoners, were taunting Togolese striker Emmanuel Adebayor with mass chants about the gun attack on the Togo national football team bus last year, which left three people dead. “It should have been you” was the clever line they came up with. 

A week before that, Manchester United fans at the Carling Cup tie against bitter rivals Leeds United unfurled a banner with an utterly humourless reference to two Leeds fans who were stabbed to death in Istanbul. 

Leeds fans responded by chanting about Munich and the plane crash in 1958 that killed eight of United’s fabled Busby Babes team. 

Other major headlines have included Arsene Wenger’s refusal to shake the hand of Spurs coach Clive Allen, and QPR star Adel Tarrabt storming out of the stadium after being substituted at half-time, only to be caught posing for pictures with fans near a pub. 

And that’s just this weekend. 

Ask yourselves – who is the poster boy for the England national football team? Wayne Rooney, the man who slept with sex workers while his wife was pregnant, and who used the loyalty of a club that has turned him into a global superstar as a bargaining tool to negotiate an even ludicrously higher contract. 

Owen Hargreaves, having earned a healthy salary from Manchester United for four years where he played less than 30 games, had the cheek to turn around and accuse the club of ruining his knees and hampering his recovery. Sorry Hargo, but you really were made of glass. 

Half the England squad have been linked with vice girls at some point, and we might be finding out even more after Rio Ferdinand’s privacy case against the Sunday Mirror was dismissed, a possible landmark case in favour of the English tabloids. 

It seems players and fans alike in English football have taken that sense of self-entitlement a little too far, thanks to this grotesque culture of excess often masked as passion that has been slowly growing beneath the polished exterior of the Premier League. 

Tevez might be the latest personification of that. but he wasn’t the one that broke the rules to bring himself to the Premier League. West Ham did. 

The money he earns might have bloated his ego, but City were the ones who were more than willing to pay him. They even made him club captain. 

Mancini’s own son, Filippo, was revealed to have recently refused to come on as a substitute in a match for City’s youth team, just like Tevez in Munich. 

He’s not a contracted player like Tevez, who earns £1,000,000 a month, but that’s not the point. He’s a young boy who has been given the chance to live the dream as a well-paid professional footballer (even if it’s with City), but apparently that wasn’t good enough for him. 

So Roberto Mancini can go all saintly on Tevez now, but in truth, he’s just as much a part of the bigger problem that now taints English football.

On paper, I’d like to say I should have better things to do than spend the better part of a week chasing a bunch of guys who kick balls and wear shorts for a living all over town.

Having just realised how wrong that last line sounded, let me set the record straight (pun truly intended) – I was assigned to cover Chelsea Football Club’s recent tour stop in Kuala Lumpur – their arrival, the press conferences, meet and greets, community projects, training, the friendly game against Malaysia and most importantly, the interviews.

So yeah, since those guys in shorts included Premier League living legends like Frank Lampard, Fernando Torres and Didier Drogba, I didn’t mind so much.

Nothing truly prepares you for the mania that surrounds an English Premier League team coming to Asia. You’d find grown men waiting desperately outside the team hotel just to catch a glimpse of their favourite footballers. I assume these are the same people who complain about K-Pop fans being silly.

Come to think of it, I’ve interviewed Lady Gaga, rock heroes Incubus and MTV World Stage hit Neon Trees in the past two weeks as well, and none of them got anything close to the kind of reception Chelsea got.

Okay, so Gaga had a handful of teenage fans waiting downstairs at the lobby of the Marina Bay Sands. Chelsea turned the lobby of the One World Hotel into a sea of blue.

Well Gaga’s just one person right? Maybe Chelsea got a bigger crowd because they themselves are a bigger crowd? Wrong.

Manchester United sent just ONE player – an ex-player, actually – to KL three weeks ago when Edwin van der Sar came with the Champions Trophy Tour, and I had to literally claw my way through the crowd to get into that interview room; and even there, I was made to sweat for it. Three other colleagues of mine were there, and none of them managed to get an interview.

As for Incubus, after our interview the guys went lounging by the hotel pool, and it seemed nobody recognised them at all! Now tell me Torres or Drogba could have enjoyed that same anonymity.

At all the Chelsea events, there would be a throng of reporters, photographers, videographers and sportscasters from not just around the region, but also from Britain, desperate to get some face time with any of the players. It was mayhem. Everyone was restless.

No offense to the Neon Trees, who were really cool, but there was no such clamouring at their press event.

Arrival

The mayhem began when the team arrived at the One World Hotel in Petaling Jaya, Selangor. A crowd had built up even though it was the middle of a working day (I’d like to think it was because we tweeted it out on twitter.com/thestar_rage – shameless plug), and you could see quite a lot of them, in office wear, clutching Chelsea jerseys.

I was there because there was going to be a press conference with new Chelsea manager Andre Villas-Boas and two players, who turned out to be Frank Lampard and Branislav Ivanovic.

And no, I didn’t get the chance to see if Frank remembers me from our London interview =(
Villas-Boas, now often referred to as AVB, seems like a pretty serious guy. We had another chance to talk to him after the 1-0 victory over Malaysia (it was NOT a goal, by the way. I was sitting right along the goal line), and his tone was more or less the same – very business-like.

One thing I noticed about him is that he never gives a straight answer. It’s never yes or no. It’s always a convoluted answer with lots of disclaimers and many layers of logic which prevent him from being caught out by the media.

When asked about Torres’ form, he answered by questioning the media’s “obsession” with Torres not scoring, and then moved on to talk about the importance of the “collective”, the competitiveness within his squad, and the objectives of pre-season training. It would’ve been easier to just say “no, I’m not worried about it”; but that’s not AVB’s style, I guess.

But he did show a “soft side”, so to speak, when talking about pre-season training camps.

“You can do in Asia, in Europe, in America or in other countries, but it’s always important to touch the people who loves us, but are far away from us,” he said.

Player interviews

I think the most fun I had that week was asking Ashley Cole about, y’know, his “personal life”.

The England left-back has had a hat-trick of secret lovers reveal themselves after news broke that he was getting back together with ex-wife Cheryl Cole, the ex-X-Factor judge, who also almost became Ashley’s ex-ex-wife, and c’mon – you can’t possibly expect me not to ask about that, right?

So when the time came for the interview, I got all the questions I wanted to ask out of the way – what do you do on tour in your spare time, does the new young manager relate better with you personally, and then bam! I hit him with the big one – how do you handle the speculation surrounding your personal life?

“I don’t talk about that,” he muttered, immediately looking away, while the Chelsea press secretary stepped in to remind us that it was a “Chelsea event” and we should only talk about football.

Well I thought I phrased that question pretty innocuously, but I guess from his point of view, there’s really nothing he could say that wouldn’t be construed negatively. It was a no-win situation.

So instead, I’m left with quotes like these:

“A lot of (the players) just sleep to be honest (during pre-season tours). There are a few people who’re of course on the X-Box, but most people go sleep and relax and chill out.

“We train in the morning, we have lunch, we have a few hours’ sleep, and we train again. So there’s not really much we can do,” he said.

Really, Ashley? Do you really JUST sleep? – see? No win situation.

But to be fair, he seemed a nice enough guy. He was polite, he answered all our other questions patiently, and he took as many photos and signed as many autographs as he could. Luckily I got mine BEFORE the interview.

I had to get my picture with Ashley BEFORE the interview, of course... =P

The other interview I got to be part of was with former Arsenal, Real Madrid and France striker Nicolas Anelka. He was pretty cool too.

I asked if he felt he’s changed from his earlier days as the infamous “Le Sulk”, and he candidly replied: “I’m still the same. Nobody really knows me because I don’t speak a lot in the newspapers.

“But you know, it’s my way. I like to be simple outside of football, and on the pitch. The most important for me is to play football, enjoy on the pitch and I’ve tried to do this since I started and now, like you said, I’m at the end, and I’m pleased with everything I did in my career.”

In the end, I didn’t get the interviews I was hoping for with the big four – Lampard, Drogba, Terry and Torres – but it was a good way to end a crazy fortnight. Up next for me, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers in Hong Kong. Fingers crossed, I get an interview with one of those four. Wish me luck!