With a couple of the papers suggesting Mark Hughes is lining up yet another solid midfielder with a January bid for Milan star Rino Gattuso, you might think a team on a run of five draws would be looking forward to the return of Robinho to spice things up again.

But, with Barcelona still persistently linked with a move, the Daily Mirror's Oliver Holt says Manchester City are too good for restless Robinho. And, at the risk of becoming overly philosophical for his audience, he takes a stab at deconstructing the problem.

"He lets things drift. He exists in a vortex of uncertainty and rumour, of claim and counter-claim and senseless distortion. He’s a study in the Kafkaesque intrigue that surrounds so many modern footballers, a world of petty and impenetrable complexities.

No one being able to pin anything down. No one knowing what’s happening. Everyone assuming he wants to leave but not knowing for sure [...] This is a man who is wasting his talent, who is letting it dissolve in this web of lies and double-speak.

The irony is, I’m not even sure he’ll get back into the City team when he’s fit again. He’s getting awfully close to being surplus to requirements. He’s got to the stage at City already where he’d be a good player to have coming off the bench when you’re chasing a game."

Martin Samuel at the Daily Mail, meanwhile, heads across to the red side of Manchester to continue the debate over Sir Alex Ferguson's touchline ban, which you can read about here. Samuel neglects to go down the Kafka route and instead quotes another great thinker, Arsene Wenger, in arguing that banning Ferguson and Diego Maradona is pointless as they have, in effect, punished themselves with their rants.

"There is almost no need for sentence at all when a manager switches to rant mode because the loss of temper and dignity is penalty enough. ‘The politician who loses the debate is the one who gets nervous,’ said Arsene Wenger, the Arsenal manager, earlier this season. ‘As soon as you become aggressive on television you have lost. It is a basic rule.’

He is right. Had Maradona been calm and considered after the victory over Uruguay, his critics would have had little choice but to report that he had conjured a very useful away win to take his country to the World Cup. Instead, he was again depicted as a human train wreck and a liability to Argentina’s hopes of success. Maradona was the biggest loser here, in line with Wenger’s observation.

So, too, Ferguson who, having attacked Wiley’s condition, was quickly discredited when it transpired the official had run a greater distance than all but four Manchester United players during the match with Sunderland. The more a manager rails at referees, the less he is heard."