An absentee will cast the biggest shadow when the most intriguing Manchester derby in years spreads tension across the Old Trafford pitch this afternoon. Emmanuel Adebayor is just one of several important attacking talents denied to Manchester City as they seek a fifth successive Premier League victory that would maintain their 100% record in the opening phase of the season and strengthen belief in the prospect of translating their status as the world’s richest club into the more meaningful distinction of being able to keep up with the neighbours.

But, however much they may feel handicapped in facing their version of the damned United by the sidelining of the injured Robinho and Roque Santa Cruz, and by the doubts about fitness expected at least to reduce the participation of Carlos Tevez, it is the loss of the suspended Adebayor that is likeliest to gnaw at their confidence and diminish their effectiveness.

What it shouldn’t do is feed a sense of grievance, since a period of banishment was the only possible response to the violence perpetrated by City’s giant Togolese striker in their 4-2 defeat of Arsenal at Eastlands last weekend. The three-match ban imposed on him for raking his studs across the face of Robin van Persie was, in fact, the height of leniency. And he cannot be sure more punishment isn’t heading his way. Although the action of sprinting the length of the field to celebrate the scoring of a goal in front of a concentration of Arsenal supporters was in itself infinitely less heinous than the brutal foul, the potential of such behaviour for evoking ugly consequences was grimly emphasised when a steward was knocked unconscious by one of the missiles thrown from the seething, slavering ranks of those behind the boundary wall whose massive intellects interpreted Adebayor’s triumphalism as an excuse for impersonating a lynch mob.

No reasonable person could fail to despise the poisonous hypocrisy of so-called fans who bombard players with the vilest insults — a limitlessly personalised repertoire that is liable to be as free with homophobic and racist taunts as with the wishing of cancer on its targets or, more probably, on their children — and then affect homicidal indignation when a victim makes a gesture of defiance.

Contempt is naturally deepened by the certainty that almost all of the ostensible assassins who made such a show of scrambling to get at Adebayor a week ago would find their physical aggression evaporating in an instant if they were offered a private opportunity to fulfil their threats on one-to-one, or even two-to-one, terms.

But musings of that kind miss the point as hopelessly as did the phalanx of ex-players who were eager to step forward and suggest that Adebayor’s goal celebration was simply a mild and fully justified reaction to intolerable abuse. Their emotions are understandable but what has to be recognised is that the moment a man pulls on the strip of a professional football club he assumes a heavy burden of responsibility concerning his public conduct. He has no permissible option but to steel himself against the verbal viciousness of scumbags in replica shirts. It’s an inescapable condition of his employment that, in his relationship with the crowd, provocation must always be a one-way street.

The self-control required to meet that obligation is, of course, immensely difficult to sustain but there has to be a constant striving to do so. Apparently that need never entered Adebayor’s head. He had left the Emirates stadium for Eastlands in a swirl of bad blood, and the mutual resentment involved not only the Arsenal fans but some former teammates. The hostile agenda he carried on to the park couldn’t be satisfied by hurting the opposition with the brilliance of his abilities as a centre-forward, though he did plenty of that, and his pursuit of more tangible retribution made him by far the worst villain in a match not short of offenders (Van Persie was conspicuous among them).

Adebayor seemed ready to give unbridled expression to every egocentric impulse. Thus an assault on Van Persie’s head that might have cost the Dutchman the sight of an eye impinged so lightly on the assailant’s consciousness that it was followed just nine minutes later by the self-indulgent exuberance of the crowd-baiting antics. And afterwards Adebayor confirmed the extent of his separation from reality by saying he saw no reason why he should be suspended.

He is a 25-year-old we should all wish to see prosper, a prodigiously gifted footballer who was helped by the devotion of his parents to rise above the swarm of threatening influences that surrounded his upbringing in one of the toughest areas of a notoriously tough port, Lomé, the Togolese capital. No doubt his Manchester City manager, Mark Hughes, is determined to be a powerful supportive force in Adebayor’s development but Hughes’s utterances last week didn’t impress as calculated to bring the player out of his cocoon of self-justifying insularity. The Hughes quotes about the application of a boot to Van Persie’s face, at least those that came to my attention, all identified with his striker’s insistence there was no malice in the act. If the manager meant it was unintentional, accidental, that should have been stressed. If the raking was neither accidental nor malicious, what was its purpose? To trim Van Persie’s eyebrows?

Where it is easy to find common ground with Hughes is in the sadness occasioned by Emmanuel Adebayor’s removal from today’s contest at Old Trafford. His absence is hugely regrettable. But it’s a long way from being an injustice.

Dark depths of flawed Flavio

Flamboyant has so often been the epithet of choice in newspaper references to Flavio Briatore that some people may have imagined it was one of the names given to him by parents with a taste for alliteration. But there hasn’t been much evidence of flamboyance in Briatore’s behaviour over the past few days. Macho bluster has seldom been more abruptly gelded than his was amid the latest developments of the devastating scandal created in Formula One racing by Nelson Piquet Jr’s allegations that his Renault team — as part of a strategy to secure victory for their main driver, Fernando Alonso — ordered Piquet to crash his car into a barrier in last year’s Singapore Grand Prix.

Almost as soon as we had digested headlines telling us the Italian boss of Renault’s F1 operation was branding Piquet a liar and a blackmailer, and threatening a blitz of legal action, there came word that Briatore, inset, wasn’t going to war in the courts after all. Instead he was leaving Renault (along with the executive director of engineering, Pat Symonds) and the team had decided not to contest the allegations of monstrous cheating. So in addition to being exposed as having presided over a breathtakingly callous plot, one that put Piquet, other drivers and the spectators at hazard, Briatore has been shown to be ruthlessly unscrupulous enough to try to grind his Brazilian accuser’s reputation into the gutter. Even by the recent standards of Formula One, Flavio is a piece of work.

He is part-owner of Queens Park Rangers and there is now a suggestion that he will be able to devote more time to the west London football club. That, it might be felt, is just what the national game needs, a little brightening of its moral landscape.

Doctor now a casualty

It started out with fake blood but the sufferings continue to be real. And as the collateral damage accumulates so there is a dwindling of credibility in the assertions that a three-year ban from rugby was a disproportionate punishment for Dean Richards’s orchestrating role in the deviously elaborate charade with which Harlequins sought to cheat their way into last season’s Heineken Cup semi-finals. Last week it was announced that Wendy Chapman, the club doctor, is now forbidden to practise medicine in the UK as the result of a decision by the General Medical Council to impose an interim suspension while they investigate her conduct. The Harlequins wing Tom Williams, whose action in biting into a phoney blood capsule to facilitate a substitution precipitated the scandal, has said that subsequently, at his request, Chapman cut his mouth with a scalpel to suggest a genuine injury. Richards has always insisted he, as Quins’ director of rugby, committed himself to the further deception of a cover-up to protect the doctor. But the dishonest ethos he created is threatening to ravage her career.