You could generally tell, at Inter Milan's secluded and otherwise quiet training ground, when Mario Balotelli had arrived for work. It was the noisy revving of the engine he seemed to enjoy as he steered his car down the drive towards the club buildings. He favoured flashy, low-slung sports cars, and would usually emerge from the cockpit dressed in plenty of bling. The image of Balotelli, who joined Manchester City, the English Premier League side, from Inter just before his 20th birthday, as a prosperous, ostentatious and bumptious individual, was one he cultivated as a teenager. But even if he had not, he would have drawn attention to himself in Italian football. He is one of very few black Italians to have played for the Azzurri, the national team, and as such has been obliged to carry all sorts of baggage.
Some of this has been vile, like the racist chanting he was regularly subjected to by crowds at Serie A matches, some of it was meant to be benign, with commentators from well beyond professional football hailing Balotelli as a symbol of the successful integration in Italian society. That in itself could also be burdensome, because it put an extra obligation on the young man to show how well he could integrate into his workplace, and the highly-scrutinised strata of society that footballers occupy.
"Balotelli has made some mistakes, but you have to remember how young he is," Al Sulley Muntari, his former Inter colleague, said. Muntari has been close to one of the several conflicts of Balotelli's prodigious rise in the game, one that focused on his distinct cultural roots. He was born in Sicily to Ghanaian parents, and, at the age of one, moved to the Italian mainland with his adoptive parents. His West African lineage encouraged Ghana persistently to request he made himself available to the Black Stars' their national team.
Muntari, a Ghana international himself, found Balotelli reluctant but at the same time apprehensive about his perception among those in charge of the Italian team, who he was inclined to choose ahead of Ghana. He had played for their under-21s but also been in trouble with them for missing appointments, and it was clear that Marcello Lippi, the then Italy coach, did not view him as candidate to go the World Cup in South Africa.
With Lippi's departure, some of those clouds have lifted. Balotelli won his first senior cap under Cesare Prandelli earlier this month and the new Italy coach hopes the player will have recovered sufficiently from the knee injury that keeps him out of Manchester City's Europa League play-off against Timisoara of Romania tonight to make his first competitive appearance for the Azzurri next week. It should be the second of many caps, because across Italian football there are few strikers as exciting on the ball as Balotelli.
Balotelli has speed, power, balance and close control that allows him to attack from both flanks. He delivers an excellent dead ball too and on the field lacks for nothing in daring. Roberto Mancini, who worked with a very young Balotelli at Inter and endorsed City's £24million (Dh136m) bid for him, talks up his versatility and compares him to the best strikers in the game. "I think Mario can turn out even better than Fernando Torres [the Liverpool and Spain striker]," Mancini told reporters, "because where Torres can play in one position, centre-forward, Mario can go right, left or through the centre."
Mancini knows that he as a strategist will be judged on this signing, on his ability to bring the best out of the former Bad Boy. "I think he is going to be more suited to the Premier League than the Italian championship," Mancini said. "The defenders here do not know much about him. When they do, they will see he is a game-changer." sports@thenational.ae