IF you haven’t already seen it, get on YouTube (other video sharing sites are available) and find it. 

Sift through the cats opening doors, fizzy drinks bottles exploding, and kids weeping awful cover versions of Amy Winehouse songs like that’s what she would have wanted – and there it’ll be: Mario’s back-heel thing. A YouTube gem. 

For those not up to speed, Money City were playing a friendly against Los Angeles Galaxy the other night when Mario Balotelli breaks clear, gets through on goal but doesn’t shoot.
 

Instead he spins so his back is to the goal and tries, in one movement, to swivel and back-heel the ball into the goal. The ball dribbles miserably wide and an angry Money City manager Roberto Mancini, in a pointy-fingered rage, immediately substitutes him for showboating. 

What an ugly overreaction from the manager that was. It was only a friendly. First, Balotelli has a good argument that he thought he was offside. But even if he made up a mystery whistle afterwards and genuinely was trying to score like that, so buddy what?

Good on him. It lacked the ultimate beauty of the old school pitch classic of rounding the goalkeeper, reaching the goal line and then getting down on your hands and knees and heading the ball over the line. But it was the kind of cheeky move to celebrate in sport, not discourage.

It’s like when Arsenal, several seasons ago now, tried to pass a penalty into the net. Robert Pires and Thierry Henry botched it and everybody said how they had been naughty for even considering it. 
 

Heavens above. It was very entertaining.  Why on earth would we want to squash the showboaters? That would mean banning Andy Murray for playing a few shots through his legs at Wimbledon this year; everybody loved that, it showed the old monotone grump had a fun side. It would mean stopping Ronnie O’Sullivan playing left-handed. 

And what of the poor Harlem Globetrotters? Banned from showboating, they would be down the job centre by the end of the day and – remember – they have no transferable skills once you remove spinning balls on fingertips from the job pool. Meadowlark Lemon would be left begging for leftover fries outside Wimpey. Is that really what we want? For Meadowlark? And all because of Mr Serious, Mancini, strangling sport’s entertainers with his tacky tourist scarf.
 

With that boat of money available to him Mancini has a good chance of capturing Money City’s first Premiership title. But is he going to grind out victories like a pre-Wenger Arsenal or every Italian side that flattens a game as soon as they go one-nil up? All that money and they can’t even have a bit of fun. It suggests a worryingly cold-hearted climate within football’s new superpower. The fans will be the ones who miss out in the end.