Roberto Mancini was let go by the management at Inter Milan for his failure to do enough in the Champion’s League. He was a near sure thing to lead the side to domestic titles, with AC Milan on a downward stretch (which is now threatening to become less merely downward and more downright plummetous) and Juventus taken down by dubious match-fixing scandals, but never seemed to really threaten the big guys to reach the next level.

But he was a good bet for the oil-rich sheikhs to take on at Manchester City. He knew how to handle expensively assembled teams and could achieve that critical first step of domestic dominance. He was also a good bet to flounder when it came to big matches in European competition.

Mancini doesn’t know how to take it to the next level. And when he tries, the results are often tragicomic.

For a stretch at Inter Milan, he knew that the talented and egotistical striker, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, could get them the points, week in and week out in those workaday games the team needed to win to stay top of the league. But come those midweek games in the Champion’s League, when every game is against the best teams each league has to offer, where every team has the players and tactical nous to isolate Ibrahimovic, he stumbled regularly.

And it’s happening again.

When Jose Mourinho took over Inter Milan, he got rid of the big striker in favor of harder working, team players who, while less outrageously skillful, would also buy into a tactical scheme designed to build create multiple danger points so that opposing teams would struggle to close down them all.

Mancini has done some important things. Reinventing Yaya Toure as a new kind of no. 10, surging from deep as what some commentators have taken to calling a ‘plongeur’ (plunger), using physical force to drive through and create space. Toure also uses his underrated passing skills, but he’s certainly no artiste de pass like your classical trequartista (Totti, Zidane, Sneijder).

But mainly, he has depended on a handful of super talented players to bail the team out. When the player he’s depending on has a bad game or worse, a bad patch, he is at a loss for ideas.

Actually, that’s not true. He has ideas. Just bad ones. The only good idea he ever has is to toss Edin Dzeko onto the field and hope the talented striker bails him out. Mancini has famously been experimenting with a 3-5-2 formation. While he theoretically has the players for it, the players never looked prepped for it, with the result that the team looks scared and uncertain.

He knows he needs to take the team to the next level, where they can go toe to toe with the best teams in the world with something approaching regularity. He’s not doing that and he’s taken the approach of throwing things at the wall and hoping something sticks. They’re not sticking.