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Tevez's legs were still willing – but his heart clearly lies elsewhere

As City waved goodbye to a trophyless era, their captain was refusing to commit his future

For a moment – and it was only a moment – Carlos Tevez beamed a big, toothy grin and the phoney war between him and his club dissolved away. The translator in the Wembley tunnel had just put to him the question of the Stretford End ticker, which proclaims City's 35 years without a trophy, when his eyes widened, the chewing gum was temporarily lodged in a corner of his mouth and you could see from the look on his face what words of Spanish were coming out. "We remember that flag very well and now we can take it down," he said.

It is like a slowly dying love affair, this Tevez business. There is the occasional moment of hope to seize upon – his cameo role in the wonderfully daft Christmas video of City players making their own cards was another – but in his mind it is over, perhaps in his heart, too, though that bit is hard to tell because he does not appear to be the one making his decisions. Instinct tells you to drill at the holes in the logic of his argument but the fact he still does not have a word of English, five years after arriving, speaks loudest that he is still just someone passing through, prepared to let others make the decisions and ship him on.

"I have to make sure everything is OK for my family, I'll have to speak to them [before deciding on my future]" he said. So, why leave for Italy or Spain rather than Argentina, where his daughters reside? "You are already talking as if I have left the club," he replied. "I don't know if I am going to leave or not, if I'm going to Spain or Italy or somewhere else." Maddening.

You see why City want to keep him. New strikers come with so few guarantees for Premier League success. Look at Edin Dzeko, the player City compiled a big fat dossier on, had watched endlessly in action and on training pitches in Germany and felt was more likely to acclimatise to Manchester than David Silva – but whose pace and touch seem so lacking.

But set against that what we also saw again on Saturday – the unedifying spectacle of two parties to an estranged relationship giving their sides. "I spoke to Carlos, he said 'why you say I want to leave?' I said, 'I didn't say this, never', " Mancini insisted. It certainly ran against the grain of the day .

This has been going on for a year now – remember, it was on 6 May last year that Mancini said "if a top player is not happy to stay here then it's better to go to another team. This is not just the case for Tevez but for all players" – and the longer it continues, the more it feeds the prejudice of those who like to say that Eastlands is a safe harbour for football's mercenaries. Wembley on Saturday was actually an opportunity for City to debunk the myth peddled sourly by those who say that the club's growth is empty and meaningless because it is jet-propelled by petrodollars (as if United, who paid the same price for Wayne Rooney that City did for Tevez, or any other foreign-owned club are any different). And City did debunk the myth, in many ways.

Their desire to roll up their rich past and take it with them on the journey was epitomised by the sight of Bernard Halford – or "Mr Halford" as those members of City's staff who have known good times and bad still call the long-standing club secretary – clambering up to place his hands on the trophy. (There's a wonderful scene in the City film Blue Moon Rising in which Halford shows us inside what laughably passes for a trophy room.)

Carlos Tevez (right) shields the ball from Matthew Etherington at Wembley

The past is a big part of the new City, whose owners also like to think that the identity of the club can only include such a thing as a player with City characteristics – loyal, no-hassle winners.

Impeccable conduct is not necessarily a part of it. The raw emotion of Micah Richards, who has lived through City's good times and bad, saying "look at the fans, they've been there since fucking day one" contributed wonderfully to the sense that this is a club with soul and Mario Balotelli's admission that "my season was shit – can I say that?" is actually how he feels about things.

City players were all over the pitch, expressing what this win felt in myriad ways. And where was the captain? A few words of English would have equipped him so well for this seminal moment, but he was invisible. The legs were willing but the heart lies somewhere else.

James Lawton: Balotelli may just be beginning to vindicate gamble on volatile talent

This latest evidence certainly increases the possibility that one day Mancini will be able to say that Mario Balotelli was indeed worth all of the trouble

It may not have been universally noted but Mario Balotelli did hint at one perilous moment. He got hold of a giant model banana and appeared to be toying with a rather blunt expression of Manchester City's new and maybe historic virility.

But then, it was confirmed quickly enough, this was indeed a time, however fleeting, when all of his demons had been gathered together and whipped into submission.

As his team captured what might prove to be the first day of the rest of their lives, it was as though he too was drawing a line in some rather seriously scuffed sand. What he found in the desert of quite a lot of his past may just have been a strangely compelling power to re-shape it.

It was, like so much of Balotelli's virtuoso performance, an example of exquisite timing.

We already had copious evidence that he could be bad, or at least ungovernably eccentric, but what we didn't have any reason to know was that he could also be so very good in such a sustained and disciplined way.

Certainly his post-match assertion that he had made a conscious effort to be part of the team, rather than an alien presence beamed down from who knew quite where, had been underpinned in the only place that matters – out on the field.

You could make a labyrinthine library out of the good intentions of vastly rewarded footballers. Here, though, was the eloquence of authentic action, of what looked like a conscious effort to set for himself new standards of discipline and commitment.

One consequence which may well prove influential in City's continued progress is that he may just have given himself the challenge of living down a good name.

Such a suspicion was certainly encouraged by the sight of him abandoning a lone dash from the presentation stand, which alerted some security men, in favour of jumping up and down with his triumphant team-mates. It was, in the circumstances he had done so much to create, a much more appropriate reflection of his remarkably well-ordered contribution to his club's first trophy win in 35 years.

Balotelli the team player is not a concept that has grown seamlessly since his arrival from Internazionale and no doubt it will take more than one outstandingly rounded performance to reassure his manager and patron Roberto Mancini that he can create moorings strong enough to secure the long-term effectiveness of a loose but impressively charged cannon. Yet who can dismiss the possibility that, on such a pivotal day in his attempt to re-make the richest football club in the world, Mancini received a massive transfusion of a manager's lifeblood – the potentially sweet vindication of a seriously big gamble.

It came with irrefutable evidence that if nine out of 10 managers, with Jose Mourinho, no less, the loudest of the majority, would have turned their backs on Balotelli and his bizarre and troubling accumulation of baggage, Mancini may just find huge reward in taking such a calculated risk.

This latest evidence certainly increases the possibility that one day he will able to say that Balotelli was indeed worth all of the trouble.

Yaya Touré (right) celebrates scoring the winning goal with Manchester City team-mate Mario Balotelli

Indeed, the proposition might have been passed by a show of hands if Stoke City's splendid goalkeeper Thomas Sorensen had not so brilliantly turned away a shot of sumptuous power and control in the first half.

As it was, Yaya Touré was again the history man, the enforcer of City's revised destiny, but in the moment of breakthrough Balotelli was again bitingly relevant. Earlier he had taken a shot in the face from Robert Huth that could easily have earned a red card but his reaction involved no more than brief and routine theatrics.

Without Balotelli the Cup final which was supposed to stand on its own as a reannouncement of its important place in the diary of English football would have been doomed to the deepest and most depressing mediocrity.

This was the threatened cost of Stoke's total failure to produce the best of themselves in their effort to end a drought that had gone four years longer than City's. But for Sorensen's spirit and technique, and Jermaine Pennant's despairing application, Stoke might have raised the white flag somewhere along the southbound lanes of the M6.

Fortunately for City, and the spectacle, Touré seized his moment with the power and the certainty that marked his winner against Manchester United in the semi-final and it helped that whenever Balotelli touched the ball there were new and striking possibilities.

It meant that the symbolism of City's joy inevitably outweighed the meaning of their winning performance.

They were winners rather than mere applicants for glory at the gates of Europe and wherever you turned in the stadium there was the sense that Manchester United's noisy neighbours had something to say that could no longer be so lightly dismissed.

However, this did nothing to scale down the priorities now facing Mancini. Balotelli's performance was immensely encouraging but still no more than a down payment into a reliability fund and if Carlos Tevez's talent is something you can take to the bank his commitment to the club's future is plainly not.

The talk is of three major signings along with a significant clear-out, which you may say is pretty much par for the course of such a huge work in progress. This, though, does not lessen the pressure on Mancini to make moves aimed not only at augmenting the talent base but also enhancing the team's understanding of what it takes to gain football's highest ground.

Touré, on both his visits to the national stadium in a few weeks, has shown he has both the nerve and the mettle. Nigel de Jong and Joe Hart have displayed similar substance and from Balotelli there is at least the promise that he may just be able to keep his eyes fixed on the stars.

The City revolution will have to run a lot deeper than this, of course, but the point Balotelli might have made would have been somewhat gratuitous. Gaining Europe and the Cup in one season is confirmation enough. City have, no doubt, joined the big bananas.

Cup triumph enhances Mancini's authority and fuels City ambition

League title and Champions League the targets after club ends long wait for major trophy

Roberto Mancini finished his last interview of Saturday evening at Wembley with a suggestion for the future. "Now we also need players who have played in the Champions League," he said, "like Cesc Fabregas, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo."

He was joking, of course. It has been a long, emotional day for Manchester City who, having qualified for the Champions League on Tuesday, had now won their first notable trophy in 35 years. For all the vast amounts of money invested, the egos of their most famous players, their enigmatic owner and the various managers, directors and hangers-on, this was a day when it back to the simple things. Good players performing well and a team that was far superior on the big occasion.

City deserved their FA Cup. They beat Manchester United to get to the final, they completely out-played Stoke City on the day itself and the manner in which they celebrated the old trophy showed it clearly meant a great deal to them. But modern English football at the elite level is no longer about winning a trophy and then talking about it fondly for years. As Sir Alex Ferguson has said on so many occasions, the flush of victory disappears quickly and then the mind runs on to next season. All that changes is that the addiction to winning becomes all the greater.

So it was that Mancini came to be joking about signing three of the world's most famous footballers early on Saturday evening as the last coachloads of their fans left the stadium car park. For the winners this FA Cup is not intended to be an isolated event, immortalised in song, a commemorative DVD and an annual team reunion for the next 30 years as – with respect – it probably would have been had Stoke won.

For the ambitious, the FA Cup can only be a step along the way to the two trophies that really matter – and when it comes to ambition, City are world champions. Mancini said later that City needed to take as an example Tottenham who, having reached the heights of the Champions League quarter-finals, ran out of steam and will finish this season back where they started, outside the elite top four

Mancini wants City to push on and, having come this far, there would be no point doing otherwise. They are catching up on years of investment at clubs such as United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool and they have to build the kind of reputation that makes them a natural choice for the world's leading players. All that takes time, a commodity that is not afforded to Premier League managers at the top end.

That said, winning the knock-out domestic cup competitions have been an integral part of Mancini's managerial career up to now. In Italy he won the Supercoppa with Fiorentina, Lazio and twice with Internazionale before going on to win three titles with Inter, albeit after the Calciopoli affair had weakened the field. He has now won the main domestic cup in five of his last 10 seasons.

So what could the FA Cup do for Manchester City? It is 21 years since Ferguson won his first FA Cup with United, also his first trophy at the club, the beginning of a dynasty that is not over. Then, in those days before the Premier League and the Champions League, the competition meant more than it does in its diminished modern form where it must share the day with league games from Ewood Park and Bloomfield Road.

But let us not get too sentimental about the FA Cup: it has always come second to the league championship, even in its so-called golden age. That is why the winners of the league are called the champions of England and the FA Cup winners are just the FA Cup winners. In that respect, City's trophy is no less important than United's in 1990. Now, as then, there were no big teams missing from the competition and none who said they did not want to win it.

What is different for Mancini is, having won City's first trophy of this era, how the rest of the competition shapes up. Although United finished a woeful 13th in the old First Division in 1990, five points off the relegation places, Ferguson had only one considerable opponent when it came to conquering English football, the then-champions Liverpool. Mancini has to navigate a much trickier path through Arsenal, Chelsea and then United – and with Tottenham and Liverpool snapping at his heels – if he is to win a league title.

It is telling of the differences in English football from 1990 to the current day that in the 1989-1990 season United finished 31 points behind Liverpool. Yet the task of winning a league title for City, who trail this season's champions United by a much more modest 12 points with a game in hand, would seem to be just as daunting as that which faced United after their 1990 FA Cup.

It took United three seasons to win their first league title of the modern era after that initial Cup success. Mancini will not have that kind of time afforded to him but on Saturday you could see what he means when he says that this is a young team that needs time to grow. Joe Hart, Vincent Kompany, Nigel de Jong, Yaya Touré and Mario Balotelli were all excellent. Even if the opposition were not up to much, they coped well with the pressure of the occasion.

It never looked like it would be Stoke's day. Jermaine Pennant gave Aleksandar Kolarov a hard time of it in the first half and Thomas Sorensen's save from Balotelli in the 24th minute kept his team in the game. But before Touré seized on a loose ball in the 74th minute to score the game's only goal it felt like a question of when City would score – they had squandered enough chances along the way.

The other consequence of winning a trophy is the authority it confers upon a manager. In a club that seems to exist at times on the tension between Mancini and his captain, Carlos Tevez, that gives the manager a bit more clout. He will undoubtedly need it for the road ahead, because if he is to be believed this is only the beginning.

Scorer: Manchester City Y Touré 74.

Substitutes: Manchester City A Johnson (Barry, 73), Zabaleta (Tevez, 87), Vieira (Silva 90).

Stoke City Whitehead (Etherington, 62), Carew (Delap, 80), Pugh (Whelan, 84).

Booked: Manchester City None.

Stoke Huth, Wilkinson.

Man of the match De Jong.

Match rating 6/10.

Attempts on target: Man City 14 Stoke 1.

Referee M Atkinson (W Yorkshire).

Attendance 88,643.

Manager beats drum for another big spending spree this summer

Roberto Mancini fears that a climate of belt-tightening at Eastlands could hamper the club's League progress

The Manchester City manager Roberto Mancini voiced his fears yesterday that the club risk falling out of the Champions League after one season, like Tottenham Hotspur, if they do not spend again this summer, although the club's football administrator Brian Marwood's subsequent suggestion that "only tinkering" is now required provides a sense of how fraught the club's next step may be.

Mancini has become increasingly concerned that a climate of belt-tightening at City, who face a struggle to comply with Uefa's financial fair play regime, may leave the club reflecting next spring on a colourful adventure to the Champions league knockout phase and yet a failure to maintain Champions League status. "This year we should take Spurs as an example," Mancini said. "They got to a Champions League quarter-final and finished fifth or sixth in the league. It's tough if you don't have a big squad and change six players every game."

Mancini, whose captain Carlos Tevez has said that he must consult his family before deciding on his own City future, also declared after the historic FA Cup win over Stoke City that "now we have this time to buy other players". Although Udinese's owner, Giampaolo Pozzo, is looking for a ten-fold profit on Alexis Sanchez – City's prime target – four years after buying him for £3m in 2006 and loaning him back to clubs in Chile, the need to buy has been a recurrent Mancini theme. The manager declared four days ago that "there is this [summer] market where we can buy".

But Marwood and his chief executive, Garry Cook, must immediately begin driving down City's £121m losses – including £133m on wages – and with both determined to sell loaned players before buying more, the most frugal City transfer window in the Abu Dhabi era may severely test the relationship. "We have put together a group whose average [age] is 24-25," Marwood said. "I don't think there will be major changes, just tinkering. We believe there is a good four years with this group to develop even further."

City, who will not parade the FA Cup before tomorrow night's home game with Stoke out of respect to the defeated finalists, have also received no further assurances from Tevez, despite Mancini claiming his tenth trophy in a decade of management and City's first in 35 years. The Argentine insisted that he was not holding City to ransom for an increase in his £200,000-a-week salary.

"No, no," he insisted, when asked in his first public discussion of his future beyond the summer if the uncertainty he is creating was about money. He declared that if he leaves it will be "a personal decision rather than a professional one", based on missing his daughters Florencia and Katie. He ducked suggestions that he should therefore have to leave for Argentina, where they live, rather than Italy or Spain.

Mancini admitted that Tevez challenged him last week over words on the issue, attributed to the manager in the Italian press, and with an increasing sense of dislocation between the two, the only crumb of comfort Tevez offered was his declaration that the prospect of overhauling Manchester United as the Premier League champions might be an enticement. "That is a great motivation to stay," said Tevez.

The holders of the Old Trafford "ticker" banner proclaiming City's 35 years without trophies, are coming under pressure from some United fans to remove it now – and possibly hand it to City – though there are as yet no plans in place to do so. United, basking in a record 19th title, have no intention of involving themselves in this delicate issue. "They can do what they like at Old Trafford," goalkeeper Joe Hart said. "I'm annoyed to be even saying their name today because this is about us. It's about Man City winning the FA Cup and Man City getting into the Champions League."

City will parade the trophy on the evening of Monday 23 May, the day after the conclusion of the Premier League season, when an open-top bus will take the squad and trophy from the city centre to the stadium, starting at 6pm.

Rooney puts United in league of their own

Blackburn Rovers 1 Manchester United 1: Record 19th title is brought home despite uninspiring away performance

Perhaps it was appropriate that the man whose goal secured the championship that saw Manchester United eclipse Liverpool was born on Merseyside during the seven long years when the title never left Stanley Park.

As he stepped up to take the pen-alty, Wayne Rooney admitted to being almost overwhelmed by nerves. "It was terrifying," he said afterwards. "I had to compose myself before taking it because there was such a long delay. The year I've had has contained so many ups and downs but this is a fantastic feeling for the fans and for ourselves."
As the penalty buried itself in the depths of Paul Robinson's net just in front of the Manchester United supporters crammed into the Darwen End, enough toilet roll came streaming down to keep the Andrex puppy happy for hours. Everyone at Ewood Park sensed it would be enough. It was a result that satisfied both teams, who played the ball among themselves for the last five minutes to create shades of the non-aggression pact between Austria and West Germany that stained the 1982 World Cup. Blackburn would have taken a draw before kick-off and it was all Manchester United required.
Though the presentation of the Premier League trophy will bedelayed until the final home game, against Blackpool next Sunday, United celebrated on the final whistle with an impromptu conga as the electronic scoreboard above them gave details of a Blackburn fan's 40th birthday. The chorus was constant: "Are you watching Merseyside?"
If Merseyside were watching, they might have concluded that this was not a championship won in the grand manner and was in emphatic contrast to the dismissal of Chelsea lastSunday that had taken United teetering to the brink of history. In truth, it was typical of a Manchester United side who away from their great fortress at Old Trafford have won as many away games as Blackpool and probably won them not as well.
The goal that settled everything came from a penalty controversially awarded when Javier Hernandez sprinted towards a gorgeous long ball from Ryan Giggs, the great common denominator of United's dozen Premier League titles, and Robinson came out to meet him. The Mexican fell and the referee, Phil Dowd, consulted his assistant before confirming the decision.

Until then the Premier League title race had been still alive, albeit on a hospital drip and with a priest at the end of the bed. There was a danger that Blackburn, whose 7-1 humiliation at Old Trafford had played no small part in Sam Allardyce's dismissal, would be left as bit-part players in their own stadium, especially when in the opening five minutes Nani directed a header on to the crossbar. It was not to last.

Perhaps it was appropriate that United should have secured their 19th championship against Blackburn. Sir Alex Ferguson had celebrated his first Premier League title, the one that proved the catalyst for everything that followed, against the same oppo-nents at Old Trafford. Then, in 1993, Aston Villa's failure to beat Oldham had made them champions without kicking a ball and most United players had left the house of their captain,Steve Bruce, as dawn was breaking over Cheshire. A few hours later, they beat Blackburn 3-1.

For much of this match, Ferguson's latest generation played as if they were consumed by genuine hangovers, with their manager acknowledging that they carried plenty of luck; not least when Martin Olsson rose above Antonio Valencia to head against the post early in the second half. United would have been two down, and in this kind of mood that deficit would probably have been beyond them.

This time last year, a goalless draw at Ewood Park had proved a terminalblock to Manchester United's pursuitof Chelsea. Here, Steve Kean's side were rather better than Allardyce's had been 12 months before, and had Olsson directed his volley that met Michel Salgado's wonderful cross-field pass slightly to his right, they would have created one of the goals of the season. The goal Blackburn scored came when Tomasz Kuszczak seemed to have tipped Brett Emerton's shot for a corner, only for Olsson to play it back in with a deep cross that saw an out-of-position Jonny Evans fail to pick up the Australian with fatal consequences.

Attendance: 29,867

Referee: Phil Dowd

Man of the match: Olsson

Match rating: 7/10

Why United won it: Young master Javier, Fergie's desire and golden oldie Giggs add up to a winning formula

A 1-1 draw at Ewood Park gave Manchester United a record 19th League title. Steve Tongue picks out seven reasons why the trophy is heading for Old Trafford again...

Others were not good enough

Because of a relatively poor away record, United's final points total will be the lowest to win the title for many seasons and below the 85 or 86 points that runners-up normally achieve. Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester City will finish nowhere near that and should all be kicking themselves for failing to take advantage in an unexpectedly open contest. For United to have reached the New Year having won only one away game and still been top of the table was an indictment of their supposed challengers, who for widely acknowledged reasons all fell badly short.

Old Trafford was a fortress

The failure to win away would have undermined any title challenge were it not for a superb home record – West Bromwich Albion are the only team to leave Old Trafford with a draw so far. As in the past, some critical wins came late, emphasising the manager's claim that this team would never give up.

Ferguson kept his appetite

David Meek, the veteran journalist who assists with Sir Alex Ferguson's programme notes, recently described how he is told to be at the club's Carrington training centre at 7.30am and sometimes believes he has arrived earlier than the manager – only to discover the latter has already been in the gym for half an hour. It is unthinkable that nine years ago Ferguson was preparing to retire, until his family talked him out of it. Enthusiastic and passionate as ever – witness a recent five-match ban from the touchline, which had no adverse effect – he appears to have been rejuvenated by the task of freshening up his squad without relaxing the pursuit of trophies.

Young guns rose to challenge

Finally stepping out of Cristiano Ronaldo's shadow, Nani flourished with a whole host of assists and some valuable goals. The young Brazilian full-backs Rafael da Silva and, more recently, his brother Fabio added attacking vim to growing defensive awareness. Chris Smalling grew up quickly when deputising for Rio Ferdinand. But above all, Javier Hernandez, expected to undergo a season of learning, proved himself a young master. Playing second fiddle to Dimitar Berbatov in the first half of the season, he outscored him from then on and formed an ideal partnership with Wayne Rooney; one the latter clearly preferred.

Golden oldie's new lease of life

Gary Neville may have reluctantly given up the good fight and Paul Scholes often struggled but Ryan Giggs went on and on, revitalised by his role in central midfield and even turning in a 45-minute cameo at left-back away to West Ham. Used more defensively, his goalscoring suffered but he still maintained his record of at least one goal in each of the past 19 seasons.

Rooney dramas never becamea crisis

Rooney's complaint that United were not showing sufficient determination to match his own ambitions has been made to look rather foolish, even though he is now the beneficiary of a new five-year contract. There were those who would have liked the club to take a firmer line when his transfer request was made public in October but Ferguson was not inclined to cut off his nose to spite his face. On New Year's Day, Rooney began scoring again and continued doing so, the highlight being a hat-trick at West Ham last month. The subsequent two-match ban for swearing at a television camera merely earned him a rest before the Champions' League games with Chelsea.

Juggling the competitions

Runs to the semi-final of the FA Cup and final of the Champions' League might have taken their toll. But Ferguson has more experience than anyone in knowing when he can get away with holding players back for a tougher assignment. Only rarely, as in a 4-0 League Cup defeat at West Ham, did he miscalculate. The luck of the draw was on United's side too. In the FA Cup the only away tie was at League One Southampton, where a side showing eight changes were losing until Giggs and Nani were sent on. In Europe, the draw brought Marseille and Schalke, and the only adverse knock-on effect seen all season came in the disappointing Cup semi-final loss to Manchester City, four days after the second Chelsea game.