FA Cup preview: Disillusioned Vieira's quest for City credibility

Photo / Brett Phibbs

The Manchester City player perhaps most qualified to hurl abuse at Roberto Mancini on Tuesday night was the one who played an unwitting role in Carlos Tevez firing such choice opinions in the manager's direction.

Patrick Vieira, whose call-up into the game against Tottenham inadvertently stoked the ire of an expectant Tevez, doesn't belong to the generation who hurl boots and shin-pads around dugouts, though privately he has been suffering for weeks.

The 34-year-old Vieira vindicated Mancini's judgment. His contribution in combating a Spurs midfield which was beginning to overwhelm City's at Eastlands was probably his finest since he arrived at the club 16 months ago and will one day be a significant footnote in the history of how City got rich and took on the world.

Yet Vieira has been nursing a quiet indignation, this season being the first of his 17-year career in which he has been fully fit and yet unable to command regular, top-flight football. There have been just four Premier League starts, a reflection of the resources at Mancini's disposal perhaps, but to the eyes of many a desperate waste of a player who has arrived at his best physical shape for several years.

The display against Spurs suggests Vieira should be considered to face Stoke City at Wembley tomorrow, though Gareth Barry's absence from the squad on Tuesday indicated he was being rested for the role.

The good money now is on Vieira calling it a day at the end of the season. If the manager asks him to take his experience back to Europe's highest stage for another year, he will seek reassurances about being more fully occupied.

Vieira was not signed in January last year to be the player we saw at Arsenal. He had already adapted his game, just as his old foe Roy Keane did, when the legs became a little more leaden and games could not always be bent to his will. He arrived to the sound of doubts from two former Arsenal teammates, Lee Dixon and Nigel Winterburn. And though he responded with typical elegance, he suffers against sides who play at a fast tempo.

The passing is still there, though - the ball which set up Emmanuel Adebayor's goal against Bolton at Eastlands last year will live in the mind for a while - and then, in the 5-0 home defeat of Sunderland 39 days ago came a manifestation of the more intangible benefits he brings to the dressing room. City were 3-0 up and cruising when Vieira scored from Aleksandar Kolarov's cross and was mobbed with unmitigated glee. Such are Vieira's incalculable benefits to a team's esprit de corps.

Those assets, as much as his playing talents, were what nearly persuaded Arsene Wenger to bring him back to north London the summer before he left Milan for City. Vieira did not earn a call-up to the 2010 French World Cup squad because Raymond Domenech was irritated to hear that he had told one of the coaching staff that he wanted to join Henry in the pantheon of players who played four tournaments. The coach believed players should want to be there only for the team. But the farce which engulfed Domenech's side in South Africa would not have occurred with Vieira around.

Since Arsenal's first Double in 1997-98, Vieira has - 1999 apart - won at least one major trophy every single year, with either club or country. And so it may be that Vieira, occupied by off-field charitable interests, sees helping City end their 35-year drought on Saturday as the perfect way to sign off. "Will I [head] back to France?" he said recently. "Probably not. A mid-table team in England? I can't see it. It would not be a problem for me to stop tomorrow because I have been lucky enough to experience everything."

- INDEPENDENT