IT'S saying something that Manchester City are going through their managers at an even more ridiculous rate than they did when the club hadn't a penny. For Shay Given, it's an old, old story.

No better man than Given to cope with the revolving door principle. His expertise in this area was honed and sharpened in St James's Park, a management merry-go-round centre of excellence. Over the last two years, he's had eight different managers.

He's worked under Sam Allardyce, Nigel Pearson, Kevin Keegan, Chris Hughton, Joe Kinnear, Alan Shearer and then Hughton again at Newcastle and when you add in Mark Hughes and now Roberto Mancini, that averages out at a new man every three months or so.

Throw Steve Staunton and Giovanni Trapattoni into the mix and Given will have listened to 10 different versions of the way football should be played by the time Mancini gets his feet under the table at Eastlands. It must be some job trying to keep everything straight in his head.

Fortunately, Given has seen enough of this kind of thing to roll with the punches and while there may be some truth in the suggestion that he and Kolo Toure were sent by the rest of the Manchester City squad to remonstrate with CEO Gary Cook and to express their displeasure at the sacking of Hughes, he will be aware of Mancini's reputation as a young coach who makes things happen.

More than anything else, Given wants to win something to gild a career that has personally been very successful but without the adornment of medals.

He left behind a way of life to play for Manchester City and the move finally gave him the recognition he deserved. With unlimited cash, Hughes could have courted anyone he wanted, but he chose Given.

He rejected Richard Dunne, probably the biggest mistake he made. Ireland's best defender is flourishing at Aston Villa while Hughes' defence has struggled since he left.

Did Hughes deserve more time? Probably not. At no stage did he ever look like a man in control of his brief; more like someone swept along by events.

Buoyed up on a tide of money and opportunity, he knew that he might only ever get one chance as good as the one fortune had created for him in Manchester.

But he sacrificed a good deal of his image as a strong leader and a straight talker when he left the simplicity of Ewood Park for Eastlands.

Operation

While he tried to assemble his own team over time, a separate operation at the club was busy bidding for the biggest players in the world and slowly but surely eroding his authority.

Half the time, he didn't seem to know what his betters were up to in the transfer market and he was certainly in the dark about Cook's pursuit of Mancini.

Hughes is now occupying the place where football is at its most brutal. The greatest chance he will ever get to dine at the top table as a manager has been ripped away and he's still only 46.

There is, of course, another Irishman at Eastlands, but it is perhaps hoping for too much that Stephen Ireland might learn some lessons from events at his club over the last week and realise that life is far too short.

It will be interesting to see if Mancini's plans include Ireland who seems to have faded out of the picture during Hughes' last month or so in charge. Perhaps Giovanni might pick up the phone to Roberto and chew the fat about this strange young man's peculiarities.

You never got the impression that Hughes was a wholehearted supporter of a return to international football for Ireland. He seemed happy enough that one of his best stayed in Manchester while players scattered to the four corners of the globe for international duty.

With a new manager and perhaps new priorities, Ireland might even do a bit of growing up and realise how stupid he has been to burn so many bridges over something so foolish.

Which brings us to Robbie Keane and further foolish activity. It looks like he has survived a rollicking from 'Arry with the captain's armband still attached, but that doesn't rule out the possibility that he could leave White Hart Lane.

We've been here so many times before in Keane's career. Every transfer window, winter or summer, comes with stories about possible moves and the hottest rumour in recent days linked him with Celtic -- and that was before he became a tour operator and flew a significant chunk of the Spurs squad into Dublin for a knees up.

Some saw Keane's party organising as a direct challenge to Redknapp's authority and a good reason for the Spurs' boss to offload him.

He can only offload him if Keane wants to leave and from recent statements made by Daniel Levy on the subject at the Spurs AGM, Spurs don't want to sell and the player wants to stay.

Evolution

From a personal perspective, Keane's actions have set him back. We all watched the slow evolution of a brash and over-confident young striker over the last few years to the point where Trapattoni immediately identified him as the key man in the Irish squad and team.

The trust Trapattoni placed in him added to the natural onset of maturity gave us a Robbie Keane we could all admire and in Paris last month, he gave his best ever performance for Ireland when he was needed most.

Throwing a hooley for 15 workmates against the wishes of the boss is never a good idea, especially when the chances of him finding out about it are about 100pc.

That said, Redknapp's own comments on Keane Tours added some confusion. First, he said he knew that they were off to Dublin for a game of golf and that he was fine about it. But he performed a back flip a few days later and took out the cane.

That's the part of this that Redknapp will be most annoyed about. It's one thing for professional footballers to head for the pub, but when the newspapers know about it before he does, it doesn't say a lot for his control over team affairs.

Up in Sunderland, Andy Reid must have smiled when he read about Robbie's away day. As football misdemeanours go, singing another song while someone puts a pint in front of you is hardly in the same league as hiring private jets and transporting most of a club to a foreign city for a day on the lash.

Mind you, Keane is sharing Reid's punishment and has been stuck to the bench for back-to-back wins over Manchester City and Blackburn, which took the sting out of Redknapp's anger.

If that situation persists into the transfer window and Spurs keep winning with Jermain Defoe and Peter Crouch leading the line, speculation will crank up again with a vengeance.

- Paul Hyland