All in the Game: Things to do in … Manchester? ‘It rains all the time, you can’t go anywhere. It has nothing’

Drop zone for metropolitan Manchester

Manchester has attracted its fair share of overseas footballers over the years and it would be true to say that not all of them enjoyed living in the area.

Carlos Tevez vowed never to return there again after his spells with United and City, “not for anything”. Why? “There is nothing to do in Manchester. There’s two restaurants and everything’s small. It rains all the time, you can’t go anywhere. It has nothing.”

Oleksandr Zinchenko, now with Arsenal in the sunnier climes of north London, was similarly unimpressed. “The weather crushes me. The sky is grey every day and it rains constantly. There is not enough homemade food. The people here are meaner … and their sense of humour is different. They sometimes laugh at things that we wouldn’t even smile at.”

Jorgelina Cardoso, you might have heard, has become the latest person to be excessively rude about the city when she reflected last week on her time there with her husband Angel Di Maria when he was with United.

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“I didn’t like it at all … I can tell you. People are all weird. You walk around and you don’t know if they’re going to kill you. The food is disgusting. The women look like porcelain. It was horrible, so horrible. I just told him, ‘Darling, I want to kill myself — it’s night-time at two o’clock’.”

Still, perhaps the most cutting observation ever about the place came from Spanish striker Nolito after his unhappy spell with City back in 2016. The weather? “My daughter’s face has changed colour,” he said. “It looks like she’s been living in a cave.”

Word of mouth

“Nobody cares if you have one or two testicles. Sometimes it’s even better with one — like when riding a bike.”

Union Berlin defender Timo Baumgartl, now back in training with his club after going through surgery and chemotherapy, finding an upside to his testicular cancer.

“You’ve just got to pull them out of the firing line. It’s just one thing after another. It’s almost like a dying dog — just put them out of their misery for a little bit.”

Ben Foster, the clubless goalie, applauding Erik ten Hag for, well, temporarily putting Harry Maguire down.

“For the longest time I thought that my washing machine was just very bad, but I have been washing my clothes with dishwasher tablets since I’ve been here. I have lived in England for eight months”

The laundry struggles of West Brom’s American striker Daryl Dike are real.

Monza disobey Berlusconi

Monza’s first ever Serie A campaign has got off to a testing auld start, the team now having lost their opening three games, the latest at home to Udinese on Friday. Coach Giovanni Stroppa is, then, already under pressure, the security of his position not helped by the fact that the club president is one Silvio Berlusconi. Not that he’d interfere in team matters or anything.

“I went into the locker room before the game and told the players we had to win, that we must not lose. I told the defenders how to act with the Udinese strikers, man-mark them, stay close, but they did not do that. I told the goalkeeper to hit it long and the strikers to have as many shots on goal as possible, these were all good suggestions that the team did not follow.”

No, that wasn’t Stroppa, it was Berlusconi.

Never change Silvio, never change.

Goalie comes unstuck

Thoughts and Prayers to GR Esperança goalkeeper Kainan after his man-of-the-match interview following a Copa da Paz match against Vic Vic.

When thanking those who had helped him along the way in his career, he said: “To my girlfriend, who’s working now, thank God, otherwise I wouldn’t be here. Grazi, a hug to you!”

The problem? “I said the wrong name of my girl,” he confessed, before somewhat sheepishly withdrawing the hug he sent to Grazi, directing it towards Jucielly instead. There’s a reasonable chance that Kainan is single as we speak.

In Quotes

“Like hugging a hedgehog ...”

Roy Keane on being shown an old clip of Alex Ferguson embracing him after a game. The feud lives.

In Numbers

1.5 billion (€1.77 billion)

That’s how many pounds English Premier League clubs had spent in the summer transfer window by last Thursday, with a week to go, more than all of last season and closing in on the £1.86 billion record. No cost-of-living crisis there.