Former Coventry City forward Craig Bellamy has hit out at Manchester City manager Roberto Mancini in an article in the Daily Telegraph.
"It was tough [when Hughes left], it felt like losing someone,'' he told the Daily Telegraph. ''It was probably as bad as losing a family member in some ways, I even struggled to eat for a few days.
"It was a totally different structure [under Mancini] which affected me completely. Mancini told me to stay with the team all the time. We had longer training sessions, but with no intensity whatsoever.
"He seemed to know my knee better than I knew it myself. He tried to explain why I had problems with it, and what I should do about it. When I told him that my knee was hurting, he tried to tell me it wasn't.
"Mancini wanted me to come in another day and do some work, but I told him that I'd finished my work that day, that I was keeping to my own schedule. That was when he started about my programme, that I couldn't follow my own schedule while he was the manager, and that I had to do what he was telling me.
"He said, 'If you don't, you can go back home now. And don't come back in again'. I replied, 'Okay, no problem, I'm going home then'. That was a week after he'd arrived, and then he never spoke to me again.
"When I went into pre-season, the physio, Jamie Murphy, spoke to Mancini and told him that I wasn't able to do a lot of the things that Mancini wanted, because it would cause a reaction to my knee. Mancini wants to have it all."