It took more than a week, but in the end it was inevitable Kia Joorabchian would ride to Carlos Tevez's defence. Who else was going to do it? The moment the Argentine refused to leave the Manchester City bench in Munich, the adviser who has made a tidy sum from his client's footballing wanderlust over the past five years was faced with an asset whose value was falling faster than that of a Belgian bank.
Now City have declared they don't want him and he is once more looking to find new employers, what club would be willing to pay big money for someone as tainted as Tevez? Who would want a bloke whose last public act while on duty was to remain steadfast on his backside when his team needed his assistance urgently. For £220,000 a week, any future employer would hope to get a little more than that for their money.
In the attempt to redeem his client's worth, Joorabchian took a traditional stance: he blamed the messenger. In this case, City's interpreter. Not even Bill Murray lost as much in translation as Tevez, is the claim the player's agent (sorry, football adviser) made at the Leaders in Football Conference at Chelsea this week. As a result of shoddy language skills his client has been prematurely judged and his professionalism unfairly maligned.
And indeed, a transcript released by Sky TV of the immediate post-match interview by Geoff Shreeves with Tevez does suggest some loose interpretation. Bizarrely the translation was provided by Pedro Mendes, a Portuguese member of the City back room staff seemingly not much more coherent in a foreign language than the notorious non-linguist Tevez, a man about as qualified to translate as the Simpsons' Dr Nick. This was not so much a carefully considered word for word rendering than a fuzzy gloss delivered on the hoof, some of it barely in English.
"Just was not feeling very good inimically/anaemically and mentally, so I put my opinion to just that," was one of his renderings.
Joorabchian's problem, however, is that the proper translation of Tevez's reasoning - with its talk of not feeling well mentally and his head not being in the right place (where was it? On Shreeves's shoulders?) - is no less damning than the interpreter's vague summation.
Here is the rub: nothing in the transcript changes the fundamentals. In Munich, Tevez, as he has been for much of his fractious career, was the agent of his own misfortune. For Joorabchian there is now a significant problem. It may well be true that Roberto Mancini exaggerated Tevez's reluctance to come on as a sub. Compared to Tottenham's response to Luka Modric, who also baulked at playing earlier in the season because his head was similarly not in the right place (he'd left it behind in Croatia), it may be the case that Tevez has been treated harshly for his reluctance.
But the fact is, although the act in isolation appears less than apocalyptic, if it was the culmination of a set of circumstances - the straw that broke the camel's back - then it was Tevez himself who had been loading the straw, bailing it up on Mancini. His endless whinges, his unspecific moans about the hierarchy at City, his complaints about the town where he has lived for the past four years, his claims of homesickness, his shameless use of his children as an excuse: none of these things make him an attractive proposition for his next employer.
And Joorabchian needs that next employer. He needs to keep the money-making machinery, the endless round of profitable transfer followed by behind-the-scenes manoeuvring for the next profitable transfer, well lubricated. No wonder he was so keen to present another view. Poor Joorabchian: and there was us thinking Fabio Capello had the toughest job in football this week. All he has to do this evening is extract a reasonably competent performance from a bunch of players desperate to play for their country.
By contrast, Joorabchian has to try and make his client an asset again. And the fact is, however you interpret it, right now Tevez is about as attractive an investment as Greece.