Stephen Ireland, the Manchester City midfield player, has delivered a withering attack on the attitude of Elano, the club’s former playmaker.

In a damning indictment of Elano’s contribution to team morale, Ireland said last night that City and, in particular, Robinho, the club’s record signing, have benefited significantly from the 28-year-old Brazilian’s summer move to Galatasaray.

Ireland said: “I’m not being harsh on Elano and players like that, but them leaving has been a real blessing for Robinho because he has really come out of his shell. They all used to stay in this little clan and you didn’t see much of Robinho, but now he’s different. He really thinks deeply about the club.”

City have had to contend with intense speculation this week that the Brazil forward is deeply unhappy in Manchester and desperate to leave the club for Barcelona in the January transfer window.

But Ireland believes Robinho is going nowhere. “He seems really happy and contented,” he said. “Since he came back in the summer, he’s been a different person. He’s really been a character in the dressing room and around the training ground.”

Robinho may be a decent professional in Ireland’s eyes, but plenty of others who have passed through the City dressing room since the midfield player broke through to the first team were not.

Many, Elano included, have been cut adrift and Ireland positively revels in that fact. Ireland thinks City’s future under Mark Hughes and their billionaire Arab owners is as golden as the lobby of the seven-star Emirates Palace hotel in which he held court, but memories of the not-so-distant past haunt him. One day — May 11 last year — pains him, in particular, but also serves as a source of motivation.

City were trounced 8-1 by Middlesbrough at the Riverside Stadium in what would be Sven-Göran Eriksson’s last game in charge of the club. The abject manner of the performance was bad enough, but it was the sight of team-mates laughing in the showers that hurt Ireland the most.

“Middlesbrough was just devastating,” Ireland reflects. “No one was that bothered. I was so angry I was close to tears because goals were just flying in. I was thinking, ‘This is ridiculous. Am I the only one who’s upset?” Everyone was shaking hands and saying, ‘See you after the summer.’ And I was thinking, ‘This is bizarre. I don’t want to be in these changing rooms.’

“There was all this talk about Elano and players like that. They were getting all the credit, but I didn’t think they had done enough to earn that credit. I think Elano had seven or eight games [at the start of that 2008-09 season] and suddenly everyone was saying, ‘We haven’t seen a player like this in a long time.’ He took all the praise and publicity and I felt as hard as I was working — even when I was giving 110 per cent — I never got that recognition.”

Ireland had had problems of his own that season. Not least when he was caught out lying to Steve Staunton, then the Ireland coach, about the death of his grandmother in a plot to mask the fact that his girlfriend, Jessica, had suffered a miscarriage and he wanted to be excused international duty. But the crushing defeat by Middlesbrough and subsequent appointment of Hughes proved the catalyst for a remarkable transformation.

While Ireland embarked on his intensive summer training regime, the full benefits of which became evident the next season en route to him being named City’s player of the year, others sat back, many of whom had had it too easy under Eriksson, and refused to embrace Hughes’s vision.

Ireland added: “The first ever meeting the gaffer [Hughes] had at Carrington, he gave a speech saying, ‘We are going to do a lot of things differently and either you get on board or you’re going to find yourself in a hard place and it’s going to be very difficult.’ Some people didn’t change. Some players were 28 or 29 and it was all new to them, this regime. How can you get to that age and not have a regime of being professional?”

It was not an easy process. Hughes had to brave a mutiny to get things the way he wanted, but Ireland is delighted those dissenters did not get their way.

“That’s why last year he was fighting his corner all the time,” Ireland said. “Not many players were pulling in the right direction. The kind of players who are not here now. He’s brought in the right calibre of players, all professional.”

• Roman Pavlyuchenko, the Tottenham Hotspur striker, wants to leave the club because spending most of the first half of the season on the bench has cost him his place in the Russia team. Asked if he is planning to leave in the January transfer window, the striker said: “Yes, because it’s impossible for me to stay in the present situation.” Pavlyuchenko joined Tottenham for £14 million from Spartak Moscow in August last year. “If we qualify for [next year’s] World Cup, would they [Russia’s coaches] need a player who doesn’t play regularly? I want to play, not warm up the bench,” he said yesterday.