City dossier prepares way for Dunne's dismissal
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Your support makes all the difference.Manchester City plan to use Richard Dunne's past history of disciplinary breaches to terminate his contract at Maine Road. The Republic of Ireland defender's future will be discussed at a board meeting tonight, and a dossier of Dunne's former transgressions is being compiled.
City must prove they have given Dunne warnings about his behaviour in the past before making any attempt to terminate his contract, which is worth around £16,000-a-week.
Dunne has been suspended and fined two weeks' wages for turning up at training last week with a hangover, the maximum that the City manager, Kevin Keegan, can apply for one offence.
However, City will drag up other instances when Dunne was fined in the past 18 months – and there may be three other cases to take into consideration in that period.
Dunne was fined twice by the previous Maine Road manager, Joe Royle, for being late or unfit for training. On the second occasion Royle played the Irishman, whose subsequent error was to blame for a single-goal defeat by Chelsea that ultimately cost the manager his job.
Keegan had to fine Dunne for missing training before a game at Coventry soon after he arrived and then accepted an apology from him when he did the same before a defeat by Preston. Under normal employment law a worker can be fired after a warning process, so City are trying to find out whether their system of fines put Dunne on a final warning before his latest offence.
Another City player in Keegan's bad books, Danny Tiatto, has apologised for the two-footed foul on Blackburn's David Thompson on Sunday and has asked for one more chance to reform himself despite an appalling disciplinary record.
Tiatto is facing a three-game ban and a £20,000 fine from Keegan for the foul which resulted in the fourth red card of the fiery midfielder's City career. It also comes at a time when new contract talks are going slowly and City may now be ready to sacrifice Tiatto.
Keegan has yet to hear Tiatto's side of the story, but the combative Australian put the incident down to frustration and said: "I'm not malicious, I don't go out to deliberately injure opponents. I've just had a pretty poor pre-season with injuries and the likes and I have been waiting for my chance. I've been on the bench and not getting a run.
"It's been frustrating, so when I came on I was just trying too hard to do well and got carried away. I would like to apologise to David Thompson. I didn't get the chance afterwards because I left quickly."
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