LOCKER ROOM:Manchester City may be back winning but there will be a lot of drama yet at Eastlands before the boss's self-belief is backed by achievement, writes TOM HUMPHRIES

WILL ROBERTO Mancini last until Christmas? Will he? Can he? Should he? The trouble with Roberto Mancini is not that he is too pretty but that he knows it.

In English football vanity of any brand is a suspect device. The Special One brought plenty of it to the table at Chelsea, looks and charm oozing all over the floor and sweeping hacks off their feet. He got away with it, though, because he walked the walk just as well as he talked the talk.

Players respected him because there is a difference in being a millionaire who gets left out of a winning team and being a millionaire who gets left out of a losing one. Nobody wants to publish the thoughts of the former. The tabloids are as ravenous as piranhas when it comes to the Jilted Joes of the game, however.

From the windows of tabloid offices cocked snipers rifles were trained on Jose Mourinho’s temple all the time he was in England. He may have heard the odd round whistle past his ear but he knew the truth, as Leonard Cohen might have put it. English football said once again it preferred gnarled men but for Jose it would make an exception.

Mancini is unlikely to be so lucky. His self-regard brings him to the realms of the Special One’s arrogance but without the CV to back it up. His achievements at Inter were deeply impressive but it took a certain somebody else to close them off with European success. And while Mourinho seems to have charmed his players on a daily basis, or at least a sufficient majority of them. Mancini, if you consume a red-top diet, appears to alienate a new millionaire every day.

Our view of the whole business, of course, is generally clouded and obscured by the blood lust of the tabloid media. There is no point in having a plank if nobody is going to walk it. Mancini is likely to spend many weeks out there over the briny sea with the rapiers prodding his backside and his bespoke scarf fluttering over his shoulder in the wind.

We should take it all with a few grains of salt in the meantime. A Craig Bellamy whinge does not a mutiny make. The tabs are generally more clued in than their broadsheet sisters to what happens behind dressingroom walls at big English soccer clubs but sometimes you have to wonder if the target isn’t a little easy.

A week ago, Mario Balotelli, the young striker who came to Mancini’s old workplace at Inter along with a large price tag and some form in the matter of sulks (even Mourinho couldn’t coax him to work hard), threw his gloves away in what appeared to be a sub-nuclear hissy fit following City’s defeat to Wolves at Molineux.

It was Balotelli’s Premiership debut. He is a young man in a competitive work environment with a lot to prove. It is possible he was merely disappointed.

The kid was back in the glamourous midlands yesterday and he put West Brom to the sword with two goals before getting himself sent off. Very Man City!

Balotelli’s progress at international and club level recently may begin to make Mancini look like a genius anytime soon. That won’t happen. There will be plenty more drama to be rung out of the malcontents at Eastlands before it is time to laud Mancini.

As well as his matinee idol looks, Mancini is unfortunate to be a central player in one of those stories which makes fans shudder with unease. Nobody likes to see a club being bought as a plaything by one of the richest men in the world unless it is their own club. City, especially, had forged an identity as attractive bantamweights of the Premiership, a club whose fans had developed an appealing line in ironic self-deprecation.

Now they are the nouveau riche and one stop short of putting cladding on their stadium and crazy paving all around it. Clubs like the club which City have become are dealt with and disliked on a case by case basis. It seems somehow a more natural process with Chelsea, for instance, whereas at Leeds it was just a bubble in the same shape as the Celtic Tiger.

As nobody ever gives any serious consideration to player wage caps, a centralised distribution of profits, a minimum spend on academies, etc, the fascination with clubs who enjoy forced growth under the rays of billionaires will continue.

As of now, Mancini has been in charge at Manchester City for just over a season. Of course he suffers from the disadvantage that he isn’t as gnarled as good old Mark Hughes (one imagines Roberto tenderly applying moisturiser to his wind-chapped cheeks of an evening) but when it came to meeting the expectations of the ownership he had work to do.

In this regard , how you do your shopping is critical. Fortune favours the brave. There is something in the DNA of the British-reared manager that makes him a bit wary of going to the market with his wad of notes clearly visible. Nobody will haggle and you won’t get value. You’ll come home with a bagful of millionaires who will earn more than you and who will in no way be grateful. Anyway, you like the cut of that tough little left back at Crewe.

Hughes spent money, lots of it, but always gave the impression of being uncomfortable about it and couldn’t seem to bring himself to purchase quality defenders. In terms of transfers, other clubs see Manchester City coming and they think of a figure, any figure, and then double it.

Mancini spent like a man on a game show this year. A David Silva, please, and a Balotelli, another Toure (yeah, just want to make the set) a Kolorov and that Milner over there, please. Meanwhile, he took wheelbarrow loads of deadwood and dumped them out on loans deals and transfers.

And that is his power. He demands his millionaires train twice a day, requests they don’t go drinking at student parties, looks for a bit of loyalty and so far in terms of compliance the results have been mixed.

He is playing with a full deck, though. Johnny Giles delivered an amusing line on Friday night’s well-deserved Late Late Show tribute about footballers coming into the game at 15 and leaving when their bodies are 30 but in their heads they are still 15.

This infantilism, sustained as it is by easy money and too much time, underpins a lot of the megaphone whinging that goes on in football. Having bought whoever he wanted Mancini has the luxury now, though, of being able to get rid of whoever he doesn’t want.

He had the misfortune to replace a good but not great manager and to inherit a cadre of players who had arrived in the overpaid paradise of Eastlands due to Hughes.

The balance in the dressingroom is changing critically, however. And if he can’t sell them he can freeze them out, isolate them from those they wish to infect. It’s cruel but footballers are that rich and City are that rich. Different world.

Mancini’s odds on being sacked have fluctuated as violently in the past couple of weeks as Chris Hughton’s. Basically, it is all nonsense. Newcastle are top five this morning. City are back winning. Mancini is still learning how to handle the opulence he presides over. A week is a long time, etc, etc.